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COPM^IGHT DEPOSm 



THE NEW FRONTIER 

A STUDY OF THE AMERICAN LIBERAL 

SPIRIT, ITS FRONTIER ORIGIN, 

AND ITS APPLICATION TO 

MODERN PROBLEMS 



BY 

GUY EMERSON 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1920 



1 — ' ; '^n 



Copyright, 1920 

BY 

Henry Holt and Company 






A) 



JUL -7 1^20 
©nU570575 



THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 

WITH SINCERE ADMIRATION TO MY ASSOCIATES 

IN A GREAT AMERICAN BANK — 

TRUE PIONEERS ON THE NEW FRONTIER — 

FROM WHOM I HAVE LEARNED MUCH 

OF THE POWER AND INSPIRATION 

OF CLEAN LIB ERAL 

AMERICANISM 



PREFACE 

The main thesis of this book is one that em- 
phatically needs to be uttered, and that is uttered 
here with admirable force, with convincing argu- 
ment, with copious illustration. It proclaims a 
truth which is in danger of escaping our attention 
amid the general clamor of the times. That truth 
is this: America is not radical; America is not 
reactionary; America^ is liberal. And what she 
has been she will continue to be for the simple and 
sufficient reason that liberalism is native to the 
very air she breathes, is the compelling product of 
her history, is the heart of her national tradition, 
is the essence of her national psychology. ^ i 

We are being much advised these days by many 
confident monitors of the public to discard our rich 
inheritance, as the work of men of darkened or narrow 
minds or of malevolent spirit. We shall not do so. 
At no time in her history has America stood still in 
complacent adoration of the past. At no stage has 
she been willing to cast aside her fundamental 
institutions and her customary habits of mind, both 
of which have served her well in many a period of 
trouble. Also at no stage has she been indisposed to 
improve the things that could be improved. America 
is neither troglodytic nor quixotic. She is optimistic 
and she is sensible. 

But this fundamental and pervasive liberalism of 
America is not a detached force of nature operating 



vi PREFACE 

ceaselessly and inevitably for the prosperity and 
happiness of the nation, is not something outside 
ourselves working automatically for righteousness. 
It is a personal force. It is the wisdom and the 
purpose that each individual is able to distil from 
the experiences of our people. It is self-conscious, 
and, therefore, the HberaHsm of America needs con- 
scious organization and direction that it may be 
applied always and at every point to national 
problems as they arise. 

These ideas and many others are set forth in this 
book with freshness, with vitaHty, with enthusiasm 
and with faith, controlled by a fine sense of the 
actual and of the possible. What is needed in 
America to-day is, as the author says, the organiza- 
tion of all the Hberal forces of the country, for, if 
united, they are irresistible, whereas, if disunited 
and dispersed, they lose their force, and general 
muddle results. America is not going to disown 
her past for the excellent reason that she knows 
that it has contributed incalculably to her well- 
being and will continue to contribute. She will 
not follow the frantic exhortations of the panacea- 
mongers, since her sense of humor will forbid. Not 
vague Utopianism but reasoned programs of 
reform will appeal to her in the future as they have 
appealed to her in the past. 

A remark of Ralph Waldo Emerson recurs to 
mind: "The destiny of this country is great and 
liberal. Nothing is impracticable to this nation 
which it shall set itself to do." It is because this 
book is charged and surcharged with this faith that 
it is both tonic and true. 

Charles Downer Hazen. 



CONTENTS 



PACK 



Introduction ix 

The Frontier of Ameejcan Character .... 3 

The Leadership that Made America ...... 35 

What is a Liberal? 5^ 

The Politics of the Middle of the Road . . 78 

Public Opinion and the Industrial Problem . 105 

The Need for Fifty Million Capitalists . . 144 

An American Federation of Brains 160 

Human Resources 190 

The Weapons of Truth 213 

The American Spirit in World Affairs ... 253 

The New Frontier 279 

Appendix 3^5 

Index 309 



"Always it has been the frontier which has 
allured many of our boldest souls. And always 
just back of the frontier, advancing, receding, 
crossing it this way and that, succeeding and fail- 
ing, hoping and despairing — but steadily advanc- 
ing in the net result — has come that portion of 
the population which builds homes and lives in 
them, and which is not content with a blanket 
for a bed and the sky for a roof above. . . . The 
frontier has been the lasting and ineradicable in- 
fluence for the good of the United States. It was 
there we showed our fighting edge, our inconquer- 
able resolution, our undying faith. There, for a 
time at least, we were Americans. We had our 
frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and 
abandon its strong lessons, its great hopes, its 
splendid human dreams." — Emerson Hough. 

"Between the blind forces on one side and the 
other of the industrial conflict stands a more or 
less enlightened middle group, which is trying to 
discern not a balance of power but an equilibrium 
of justice. That is Roosevelt's group. Retrained 
it. He more than any other modern figure helped 
to form the ideals of what we loosely call 'the 
public.'" — From an editorial in The Globe (New York). 



vux 



INTRODUCTION 

The great word Americanism has suffered from 
indiscriminate use. 

A considerable part of the present unrest in this 
country is due to the widespread failure to under- 
stand the significance of the American system of 
society and government. An honest but often 
somewhat superficial Americanism needs to be en- 
riched by a more specific, reasoned patriotism, 
based upon a knowledge of what America was, and 
is, and may become. If we delve beneath the name 
we may reveal the heart. 

Such a process is capable of disclosing to Ameri- 
cans sources of confidence in the fundamentals of 
democracy too firm to be shaken by the propo- 
nents of new and strange systems; it is capable of 
supplying profound reasons in support of what 
has come to be, in many minds, a pure assumption 
that Americanism is superior to any other theory 
of society or form of government. 

If we are "a nation of idealists with a genius for 
the practical," if we can revivify the splendid 
vision of the pioneers who firmly established and 
handed down to us a nation great in material wealth 
and equally great in its fundamental idealism, we 
can proceed with stout hearts toward our own 

is 



X INTRODUCTION 

frontiers. If we can spread throughout the nation 
the strong, youthful faith which built America, 
hysteria will disappear. And without hysterical 
opposition rebellious agitation cannot long flourish 
in the land. 

In this book two main points are emphasized; 
first, that the spirit of that portion of our people 
which has actually shaped the destinies of America 
has been liberal, rather than radical or conservative. 
The influence of the radical, and the counteracting 
influence of the conservative, are equally useful. 
But the liberal — the vigorous, middle-of-the-road 
man or woman does most of the zvork of the 
world, and in America, policies are in the end de- 
termined by the workers, whether they work with 
hand or with brain — or with both. Thus, the 
liberals furnish most of the leaders whom the people, 
year in and year out, are ready to follow. 

Second, it is claimed that our national spirit has 
taken its essential liberal flavor from the frontier, 
from the generations of tireless, self-reliant effort 
which won this continent for the men and women 
of our own day and which stamped them with its 
indelible character. This is the greatest source of 
self-confidence and power in the American tradition. 
It is the spirit which must inspire American leader- 
ship; it is also the spirit of the strong, clean, re- 
sourceful average man, with hope in his heart. 

The New Frontier is not a new theory. It is a 
method of approach, which is half the battle. It 



INTRODUCTION xi 

involves meeting modern American problems not 
with a new-fashioned spirit, but with the faith of our 
fathers. The spirit called for in the leaders and 
prophets of our own day is not new. Fundamentally 
the Americanism of Lincoln is no more modern than 
the spirit of Columbus, of Cromwell, of Joan of 
Arc, of Christ. It is not new, but eternal. It is our 
application of this spirit to new conditions which 
gives it a distinctive power and appeal. 

Americanism is the world force of courage ' and 
capacity and justice brought to bear upon American 
continental conditions by generations of free, strong, 
resourceful men and women. If we meet the new 
frontiers with this spirit we shall still make mis- 
takes, as our fathers did before us; but the element 
of error will not be fundamental. And as it was 
true of them, so will it be true of us, that the ele- 
ment of success will be preponderant. More than 
this no nation can ask. 

At a time when party platforms are being re- 
written because the old parties are without dis- 
tinctive programs, at a time when the social and 
industrial structure is being readjusted to meet a 
new spirit, it becomes increasingly necessary to 
return to first principles. At a time when there is 
need for all the patience of which our people are 
capable, when their native Ingenuity and their 
capacity for hard work are called upon to the ut- 
most, it is essential that they take account of the 
stores of human energy and achievement in their 



xii INTRODUCTION 

own history which they have the right to draw 
upon as a basis for self-confidence and as a source 
of inspiration and hope. 

The principles underlying Americanism are simple. 
But it is not a simple task to give them adequate 
expression. The outstanding importance of the 
undertaking today must justify this attempt. 



THE NEW FRONTIER 



THE FRONTIER OF AMERICAN 
CHARACTER 

What do we mean when we speak of the American 
spirit or the American character? Is there a pecuHar 
quality in the American as distinguished from the 
European or the South American or the Asiatic? 
If so, it is clearly an important responsibility of 
our time to find out wherein the distinction lies, 
to understand what the basis of Americanism is, 
and to cleave to it and build upon it. 

If we are not simply a mass of assorted units of 
the human race who happen for the present to be 
living in a section of North America between Canada 
and the Gulf, if we really are a cohesive people with 
distinctive traditions and characteristic ideals, it is 
obviously important to trace out these traditions 
and these ideals and to set them forth for the guid- 
ance and inspiration of ourselves and of our children. 
If there is in the tradition of America something 
concrete and simple to stimulate and inspire, it is 
vital in these days when so many merchants of 
government are offering something ''just as good," 
that we should re-vivify our traditions and that we 
should apply the principles inherent in them, with 
such changes as may be called for, but with all 

3 



4 THE NEW FRONTIER 

their native vigor, to the new conditions of our 
own time. 

Ask the average man to define the American 
spirit and he will perhaps say that its principal 
characteristic is a love of liberty. But one has 
only to turn to the history of any century in almost 
any country to find the record of men who were 
wilHng to die for liberty. Some there may be 
who will assert that democracy was conceived in 
America; but the most casual reading of history 
will show that every principle of democracy upon 
which our institutions are based had been ably 
stated and, to some extent, put into practice before 
1776. Obviously in defining the American spirit 
we are not discussing elements which can be classi- 
fied sharply or characterized in a word. 

Superficially the casual observer would be apt 
to say that we were much like our neighbors of 
Europe except for minor differences in mannerism, 
or language or dress. But if we are to understand 
the American spirit it is necessary to regard it as 
an attitude of mind, a point of view, a method of 
approach, or deeper still, a fundamental form of 
self-confidence, conviction and faith. 

The initial inspiration for the view of the Ameri- 
can spirit taken in these pages is due to Professor 
Frederick J. Turner, of Harvard, whose brilliant 
studies of the influence of the frontier upon Ameri- 
can history have been conclusive in shaping modern 
thought upon American historical subjects. In the 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 5 

best known of these papers, read before the State 
Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1893, Professor 
Turner said, "all people show development: the 
germ theory of politics has been sufficiently em- 
phasized. In the case of most nations, however, 
the development has occurred in a limited area; 
and if the nation has expanded, it has met other 
growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in 
the case of the United States we have a different 
phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the At- 
lantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of 
the evolution of institutions in a limited area such 
as a rise of representative government; the dif- 
ferentiation of simple colonial governments into 
complex organs; the progress from primitive in- 
dustrial society, without division of labor, up to 
manufacturing civilization. 

"We have in addition to this a recurrence of the 
process of evolution in each western area reached 
in the process of expansion. Thus American devel- 
opment has exhibited, not merely advance along 
a single line, but a return to primitive conditions 
on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new 
development for that area. American social de- 
velopment has been continually beginning over 
again on the frontier. This perennial re-birth, this 
fluidity of American life, this expansion westward 
with its new opportunities, its continuous touch 
with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the 
forces dominating American character." 



6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

No more profound words were ever written with 
regard to the history of the American people. 
"This perennial re-birth, this fluidity of American 
Hfe," which shaped the character of our ancestors 
has come down to us as a firm and priceless inheri- 
tance. And these ancestors of ours who took part 
in "this expansion westward with its new oppor- 
tunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity 
of primitive society" are not remote forebears 
shrouded in the mists of antiquity. They were 
the great-grandparents, or even the grandfathers and 
grandmothers of men and women now in the prime 
of life. The tradition is still vivid along the Ohio 
River; in different manifestations it makes itself 
vividly felt in almost every community from the 
Alleghanies to the Pacific. Even today it has left 
behind it in the West a vigor, a youthful freshness 
which is so abounding that it is noticeable even 
in the speech and action of the people to an extent 
which is not evident in the East and South. 

But this does not mean that the same eternal 
youthfulness has not permeated the whole nation, 
including the people of the Atlantic coast. It 
has. Its manifestations may be less apparent in 
Boston than in Zanesville, Ohio; but at heart the 
Bostonians of today are the same vigorous race 
that sent hundreds of families to the great North- 
west. And particularly in New York, which has 
drawn its people from all parts of America, there 
is evident a pioneer quality of mind, a creative 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 7 

energy, an alertness of step and bearing, a restless 
ambition which shows us to be true sons and 
daughters of the long period of frontier life which 
forms the heart of our history. 

First we have the old stocks coming over to the At- 
lantic coast of America, just as the English have 
for years been crowded out of their little island to 
the borders of the seven seas. But in America we 
have some new elements. We have men of many 
nations joining on a basis of vigorous competition. 
Another decisive element is added when all ex- 
pectation of returning to the mother country is 
abandoned. We see men moved by all the vigor 
and stimulus of self-sacrifice which comes from 
winning a home and earning a living under the free 
and inspiring influence of vast spaces. We have all 
the romance and strenuousness of thousands of 
years of the slow upward progress of the race 
crowded into a century. 

In the words of Professor Turner "The United 
States lies like a huge page in the history of society. 
Line by line as we read from West to East we find 
the record of social evolution. It begins with the 
Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of disin- 
tegration of savagery by the evidence of the trader, 
the pathfinder of civiHzation. We read the annals 
of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation 
of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn 
and wheat in sparsely settled farming communi- 
ties; the intensity of cultivation of the denser farm 



8 THE NEW FRONTIER 

settlement; and finally the manufacturing organi- 
zation with city and factory system. . . . Stand 
at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of 
civilization marching single file, the buffalo follow- 
ing the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur 
trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer 
farmer — and the frontier has passed by. Stand at 
South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see 
the same procession with wider intervals between. 
The unequal rate of advance compels us to dis- 
tinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the 
rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier and the 
farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow 
pens were still near the fall line, the trader's pack 
trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies and the 
French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their 
posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe. 
WTien the trappers scaled the Rockies, the former 
was still near the mouth of the Missouri." 

At first the individualism of the men who crossed 
the Alleghanies tended to produce a sectional rather 
than a national feeling. The point of view of 
Europe ceased more and more to be the point of 
view of the backwoodsman and the pioneer as he 
placed the Alleghanies between himself and the 
Atlantic. These vigorous men who matched their 
strength with the strength of the forest and the 
prairie soon ceased to accept without question the 
constituted authority of the Virginia fathers. It 
was this nationalizing tendency of the West that 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 9 

transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the 
national Republicanism of Monroe and the De- 
mocracy of Andrew Jackson. This independence, 
like all newly discovered freedom, tended to out- 
run itself, so that individual liberty was sometimes con- 
fused with the absence of all effective government. 

These men of the Western waters, as they called 
themselves, were able to shift for themselves with- 
out fear or favor. Their life of work, the life that 
brought out the most vigorous self-reliance and in- 
dividualism, and their attitude toward the civili- 
zation which they had left behind in the tidewater 
regions, soon began to develop in them an attitude 
of mind which was well expressed by a representative 
from Western Virginia in the Virginia Convention 
of 1830: "But, Sir, it is not the increase of popula- 
tion in the West which this gentleman ought to 
fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze 
and Western habits impart to those inhabitants. 
They are regenerated, politically I mean. Sir. 
They soon become working politicians; and the 
difference between a talking and a working politician 
is immense." 

But what are the traits that came out of this life? 
What elements of character arose from this tu- 
multuous pouring of a mixed race of people into the 
primeval forest and out across the prairie? "The 
result is that to the frontier the American intellect 
owes its striking characteristics, that coarseness and 
strength combined with acuteness and inquisitive- 



10 THE NEW FRONTIER 

ness, that practical, Inventive turn of mind, quick 
to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material 
things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect 
great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that 
dominant individualism working for good and evil 
and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which 
comes with freedom — these are traits of the 
frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of 
the existence of the frontier," 

If we may return for a moment to the East, as a 
contrast to this nervous energy of the Westerners, 
it is a fact that colonial travelers all commented 
upon the phlegmatic character of the earlier colo- 
nists along the Atlantic Coast. Henry Adams in 
his brilliant volumes on the administrations of 
Jefferson and Madison, in a final summary of the 
American character at about 1817, says, "Society 
was weary of strife, and settled gladly into a po- 
litical system which left every disputed point un- 
determined. The public seemed obstinate only in 
believing all was for the best, as far as the United 
States was concerned, in the affairs of mankind. 
The contrast was great between this temper of 
mind and that in which the Constitution had been 
framed. . . . The rapid accumulation of wealth 
and increase in physical comfort told the same 
story from the standpoint of economy. On every 
side society showed that ease was for a time to take 
the place of severity, and enjoyment was to have 
its full share in the future national existence." 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER ii 

It may be suggested that the mildness character- 
istic of the eastern Americans as described by 
Henry Adams, grew more out of reaction against a 
period of unusual energy than out of anything in 
the fundamental character of the people. The im- 
pulses which moved the men and women who 
originally crossed the Atlantic of their own free will 
were impulses of a kind which were not likely to 
die out in a few generations. They still persisted, 
though latent, in many who did not cross the Al- 
leghanies. The only qualification which a New 
Englander might care to make to Professor Turner's 
profound and convincing analysis of the effect of 
the frontier in shaping American character would 
be that perhaps the results described could not 
have been produced so readily in a people who 
lacked in the first place something of the craving 
for adventure and the love of freedom analogous to 
it. People less inspired would not have been so 
eager for "elbow room." They would not have 
been so likely to seek the frontier, nor to have been 
able to cope with its rigors after they had found 
it. This qualification, doubtless assumed by Mr. 
Turner, would simply tend to strengthen the conclu- 
sions reached but would perhaps modify in a minor 
degree the credit due to the frontier conditions 
themselves and give a small part of the credit to 
the inherent vigor of the selected group that chose 
to subject itself to the frontier influences. To 
emphasize the pioneer element in the fathers of 



12 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the frontiersman of the American West is merely 
to follow a little closer to its roots the character of 
our people and to find additional reason for con- 
fidence in their self-reHance and versatility. 

This is important because the American spirit is 
not to be distinguished from any other national 
spirit to any great extent by reason of the exclusive 
possession of any particular quahties. Other na- 
tions have had frontiers. National character has in 
other instances been influenced by restless and 
vigorous pioneers. But no state or nation, no 
people, has been, to the same extent, influenced by 
the elements in human character growing out of 
the continuous opening up of new country, the re- 
peated seeking out of new homes by the people, 
the constantly refreshed and perpetuated spirit of 
rehance upon self as the only stable and permanent 
element in a constantly shifting environment. 

That this spirit has persisted down to our own 
day it is hardly necessary to prove. It is in the air. 
It is in the hearts of our people. It shone from the 
faces of two million men who carried the fresh 
strength and youthfulness of America to war- 
jaded Europe — and carried new heart to those 
wonderful soldiers of France. Did anyone fail to 
recognize this spirit? Everyone felt it. But even 
Americans themselves were inclined to take it for 
granted. It is the greatest single asset in the 
United States today. It is the guarantee of the per- 
sistence of the institutions which it has inspired* 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 13 

Roosevelt loved the open spaces. But like most 
out-of-door Americans his love of nature was not 
purely idyllic. He was a keen hunter, a good 
ranchman, a naturalist of distinction. He was one 
of a long line of distinguished Americans who have 
been at home in the woods. ! 

It is an interesting fact that some of our most 
characteristic Americans have been surveyors at 
some period of their lives. This list includes 
Washington, Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, 
Thoreau, Lincoln. One of the fundamental things 
about a surveyor is that he blazes a trail; that he 
defines boundaries which hitherto have been vague 
and in dispute. A surveyor in the first place must 
be accurate, and in the second place he must be 
self-confident. He must be undismayed by any 
temporary obstacles and barriers which stand be- 
tween him and his objective. There is something 
particularly appealing in this type of man in this 
age of problems so varied and difl&cult of definition, 
with so many human and material variants. 

George Washington, at the age of twenty-two, 
was in command of troops at the outbreak of the 
French and Indian War. At exactly the same age, 
seventy-six years later, Abraham Lincoln was 
chosen captain of his company in the little army of 
volunteers formed to fight Black Hawk along the 
frontier between the Illinois and the Wisconsin 
rivers. Both these men brought to the over- 
whelming problems of their later years the steadi- 



14 THE NEW FRONTIER. 

ness of nerve, the self-confidence and the patience 
which resuhed from their early training. They had 
experienced the cleansing effect of contact with 
woods and hills and rivers. They had come under 
the strong, clean influence which has had so powerful 
an effect upon the spirits of men from the beginning 
of recorded history. The story of Christ in the 
wilderness, the tradition of Saint Francis and his 
friendship for the birds., emphasize the influence 
which open spaces — which nature in all its aspects 
has exerted upon the minds of men down to our 
own time, and will always exert. It is not easy to 
^tand among the ferns on the edge of a mountain 
brook, with the sun flickering through the trees 
and sending shafts of gold down into the pools and 
eddies, and deliver a well-rounded and effective 
anarchist oration. Nor is it in such places that 
men devise schemes of industrial oppression. 

The peasants scattered over the great area of 
Russia are not radicals. An American farmers' 
soviet in North Dakota is a contradiction in terms. 
Even in the great congested cities of America it 
still remains to be proved that a tradition of liberty 
and opportunity established on the successive 
frontiers of a continental wilderness are going to be 
cast aside as outworn, simply because inequalities 
and imperfections exist in our present system. 
Undoubtedly the individualism of Crockett and 
Boone and the ringing counsel: "Trust thyself! 
Every heart vibrates to that iron strmgl" need to 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 15 

be supplemented by a fuller vision of the rights of 
others, the principle of give and take, the willing- 
ness to play the game as it must be played under 
twentieth century conditions. On the other hand, 
it is to be hoped that the time will never come so 
long as America is America when a vigorous and 
constructive individualism will be subjected to a 
uniform measuring-stick. It ought never be pos- 
sible in America for any group of people to organize 
millions of men to the extent where individual 
excellence is kept down by an arbitrary prohibi- 
tion against self-realization and personal distinction. 
We must cling to the individualism of the pioneer 
spirit, but we may supplement the motto "Trust 
thyself!" with this otherwise counsel, "Trust thy 
fellow man." 

It will be interesting to individualize a little more 
the frontier life and to see what kind of people 
these frontiersmen were. Perhaps if we can catch 
their spirit it can be traced down through the 
generations as it has manifested itself in the lives of 
a few individuals who are by common consent recog- 
nized as typical Americans. The best way to call 
up in our own time a picture of the backwoodsman 
of the Alleghanies is to see him through the eyes of 
Theodore Roosevelt, whose whole life was an em- 
bodiment of the American spirit. 

In the brilliant fifth chapter of "The Winning of 
the West," Roosevelt says, "Along the western 
frontier of the colonies that were soon to be the 



i6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

United States, among the foothills of the Alle- 
ghanies on the slopes of the wooded mountains and 
in the long trough-like valleys that lay between the 
ranges dwelt a peculiar and characteristically Ameri- 
can people. . . . They all bore a strong likeness 
to one another in their habits of thought and ways 
of living and differed markedly from the people of 
the older and more civilized communities to the 
Eastward." 

He goes on to say that these backwoodsmen were 
Americans by birth and parentage, but of a mixed 
race, including a dominant Presbyterian Irish ele- 
ment which was represented by Andrew Jackson, 
Samuel Houston, David Crockett, and James Robert- 
son, "The other pioneers who stand beside the 
above were such as Sevier, a Shenandoah Hugue- 
not; Shelby, of Welsh blood; and Boone and 
Clark, both of English stock." There were Ger- 
mans, Huguenots, Hollanders, and Swedes, but the 
Presbyterian Irish, who are most commonly re- 
ferred to as Scotch-Irish, form the kernel of the 
distinctively and intensely American stock who 
were the pioneers of our people in their march 
Westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting 
settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from 
the Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific." 

The backwoodsmen were men of force who lived 
their lives in rough hewn homes, very often tem- 
porary in character, in clearings where a few families 
were grouped together throughout the wilderness. 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 17 

"The backwoodsmen's dress," says Roosevelt, ''was 
in great part borrowed from his Indian foes. He 
wore a fur cap or felt hat, moccasins, and either 
loose, thin trousers or else simply leggings of buck- 
skin or elk-hide and the Indian breech-clout. He 
was always clad in the fringed hunting shirt of 
homespun or buckskin, the most distinctively 
national dress ever worn in America. It was a 
loose smock or tunic, reaching to the knees, and 
held in at the waist by a broad belt from which 
hung the tomahawk and scalping knife. 

"His weapon was the long, small-bore flint-lock 
rifle, clumsy and ill balanced, but exceedingly ac- 
curate. It was very heavy, and when upright 
reached to the chin of a tall man. . . . The marks- 
men almost always fired from a rest and rarely at 
a very long range; and the shooting was marvel- 
ously accurate. 

" In the conquest of the West the backwoods axe, 
shapely, well poised, with long haft and light head, 
was a servant hardly standing second even to the 
rifle; the two were the national weapons of the 
American backwoodsman and in their use he has 
never been excelled. 

"The life of the backwoodsman was one long 
struggle. The forest had to be felled, droughts, 
deep snows, freshets, cloud bursts, forest fires, and 
all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. 
Swarms of deer flies, mosquitoes, and midges ren- 
dered life a torment in the weeks of hot weather. 



i8 THE NEW FRONTIER 

Rattlesnakes and copperheads were very plentiful 
and, the former especially, constant sources of 
danger and death. Wolves and bears were inces- 
sant and inveterate foes of the livestock and the 
cougar or panther occasionally attacked man as 
well. 

"Every true backwoodsman was a hunter. . . . 
He perforce acquired keenness of eye, through ac- 
quaintance with woodcraft and the power of stand- 
ing the severest strains of fatigue, hardship, and 
exposure. He lived out in the woods for many 
months with no food but meat, and no shelter what- 
ever unless he made a leanto of brush or crawled 
into a hollow sycamore." 

■ It is easier for the men of our own generation to 
visuahze the backwoodsman himself, than to visu- 
alize his wife and children in the hard surroundings 
which are here set forth, but it is well to bear in 
mind that the wife of the backwoodsman lived the 
same life that he did, partook of the same dangers, 
ate the same food and kept house among the same 
primitive inconveniences and total absence of luxu- 
ries. And when their children were born they, too, 
grew up in the same hardship. The wilderness 
with all its expanse and power and simplicity made 
its impress on their character and ran in their very 
blood. "When a boy was twelve years old he was 
given a rifle and made a fort-soldier, with a loop 
hole where he was to stand if the station was at- 
tacked." The men and women so trained and so 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 19 

reared became part of a distinctive race, full of 
vigor and individuality, capable of exerting a tre- 
mendous influence upon all who came in contact 
with them, and unlikely themselves to be too 
deeply moved by the influence of men nurtured in 
a different environment. Simple, vigorous, direct, 
the American frontiersman became a standard for 
all time of stalwart and self-reliant manhood. 

Roosevelt continues, "A single generation passed 
under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness 
was enough to weld together into one people the 
representatives of these numerous and widely dif- 
ferent races, and the children of the next genera- 
tion became indistinguishable from one another. 
Long before the first Continental Congress as- 
sembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, 
had become Americans, one in speech, thought and 
character, clutching firmly the land in which their 
fathers and grandfathers had lived before them. 
. . . They had become as emphatically products 
native to the soil as were the tough and supple 
hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of 
their long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow 
lives were yet strangely fascinating and full of 
adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as 
strong, as freedom loving and as full of blood de- 
fiance as theirs could have endured existence on the 
terms which these men found pleasurable. Their 
iron surroundings made a mould which turned out 
all alike in the same shape. They resembled one 



20 THE NEW FRONTIER 

another and they differed from the rest of the 
world — even the world of America, and infinitely 
more the world of Europe — in dress, in customs 
and in mode of life." 

This was the first stage in the great epic of the 
American frontier, one of the most fascinating and 
inspiring stories in the history of the world. It 
was predominantly an individualistic era. But the 
next stage begins to give evidence of organization 
for the purposes of cooperation and formal govern- 
ment, and Roosevelt's stirring story sweeps us 
along until we come to the little group which started 
westward from the Carolinas in 1771 under the 
leadership of Robertson and took up their resi- 
dence on the Watauga. 

It soon became evident that some form of govern- 
ment must be established, so it was determined to 
adopt a few simple rules of action which were ac- 
cordingly drawn up and known as the Articles of 
the Watauga Association. There, along the head- 
waters of the Tennessee, they were the first men of 
American birth to establish on this continent a 
free and independent community. To describe this 
association briefly, it appears that the freemen of 
each little group of block houses which could be 
looked upon as a center of a communit}^ of interest 
sent a member to the first meeting of their legis- 
lature. There were thirteen representatives who 
elected five to form a court. 

Let Roosevelt finish his story: "Thus the Watauga 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 21 

folk were the first Americans who, as a separate 
body, moved into the wilderness to hew out dwellings 
for themselves and their children, trusting only to 
their own shrewd heads, stout hearts, and strong 
arms, unhelped and unhampered by the power 
nominally their sovereign. They built up a com- 
monwealth which had many successors; they showed 
that the frontiersmen could do their work unas- 
sisted; for they not only proved that they were 
made of stuff stern enough to hold its own against 
outside pressure of any sort, but they also made it 
evident that having won the land they were com- 
petent to govern both it and themselves. They 
were the first to do what the whole nation has since 
done. It has often been said that we owe all our 
success to our surroundings; that any race with 
our opportunities could have done as well as we 
have done. Undoubtedly our opportunities have 
been great; undoubtedly we have often and la- 
mentably failed in taking advantage of them. 
But what nation ever has done all that was pos- 
sible with the chances offered it? The Spaniards, 
the Portuguese, and the French (in America), not 
to speak of the Russians in Siberia, have all en- 
joyed, and yet have failed to make good use of, the 
same advantages which we have turned to good 
account. The truth is, that in starting a new nation 
in a new country, as we have done, while there are 
exceptional chances to be taken advantage of, there 
are also exceptional dangers and difficulties to be 



22 THE NEW FRONTIER 

overcome. None but heroes can succeed wholly 
in the work. It is a good thing for us at times to 
compare what we have done with what we could 
have done, had we been better and wiser; it may 
make us try in the future to raise our abilities to 
the level of our opportunities. Looked at abso- 
lutely, we must frankly acknowledge that we have 
fallen very far short indeed of the high ideal we 
should have reached. Looked at relatively, it must 
also be said that we have done better than any 
other nation or race working under our conditions." 
There can be no doubt that we have in this 
frontier tradition an element which is definite and 
pervasive in the shaping of American character. 
The lessons to be drawn from it are capable of 
daily application. Its vigor and creative energy 
are evident everywhere in the life and spirit of 
our people. The main purpose of this book is to 
point out how this great heritage may invigorate 
our work and keep fresh our inherent idealism. 
But we need, first of all, to fix in our minds a clear 
idea of the impulses underlying the frontier tradi- 
tions, and to make better use of them because of 
our more definite reaHzation of their origin and 
potentialities. Without a full appreciation of these 
initial impulses to our greatness as a people there 
can be no thorough understanding of true Ameri- 
canism. It will be well then to pursue the analysis 
of Americanism from several viewpoints. 
' It may seem a far cry from the life of the back- 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 23 

woodsman to the writings of a young scholar 
at Princeton University; but it is an interesting 
fact that in his " Division and Reunion," written 
in 1892, the President of Princeton showed a 
deep feeHng for the significance of the America 
west of the Alleghanies. At that time Mr. Wilson 
said, " It was an awkward, cumbersome business to 
subdue a continent in such wise — hard to plan 
and very likely impossible to execute. Under 
such circumstances nature was much bigger and 
stronger than man. She would suffer no sudden 
highways to be thrown across her spaces; she 
abated not an inch of her mountains, compromised 
not a foot of her forests. Still, she did not daunt 
the designs of the new nation born on the sea-edge 
of her wilds. Here is the secret, — a secret so 
open it would seem, as to baffle the penetration of 
none, — which many witnesses of the material 
growth and territorial expansion of the United 
States have strangely failed to divine. The history 
of the country and the ambitions of its people have 
been deemed both sordid and mean, inspired by 
nothing better than a desire for the gross comforts 
of material abundance; and it has been pronounced 
grotesque that mere bigness and wealth should be 
put forward as the most prominent grounds for the 
boast of greatness. The obvious fact is that for 
the creation of the nation the conquest of her proper 
territory from Nature was first necessary; and this 
taskj which is hardly yet completed, has been 



24 THE NEW FRONTIER 

idealized in the popular mind. A bold race has 
derived inspiration from the size, the difficulty, 
the danger of the task. 

"Expansion has meant nationalization; national- 
ization has meant strength and elevation of view. 

*Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as 

your pines, 
By the scale of the hemisphere shape your 

designs,' 

is the spirited command of enthusiasm for the 
great physical undertaking upon which political 
success was conditioned." 

We see spread before us here something new in 
history: a selected group of people from a variety 
of stocks, pushing out into a rich, continental area, 
completely shaking off all the traditions of caste 
and class distinction which in their European 
homes had seemed bred into the very marrow of their 
bones, a group practically free from all governmental 
restraint except such as they voluntarily set up for 
their own protection and convenience, living in an 
atmosphere dominated preeminently by the one 
great demand of self-preservation. We begin to 
distinguish, as a fundamental characteristic of the 
American spirit, worked into its fabric during the 
susceptible years of its youth, the characteristic 
of confidence in itself; and we have the emphasis 
on material things which grew out of a life close to 
nature, when almost every waking moment of the 
time and energy of each individual had to be de- 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 25 

voted to material things if existence was to be 
maintained. 

Now comes a vital point. It is clear, as we have 
seen in the brief outline of the Watauga Associa- 
tion, that in the earliest days something more than 
self-confidence and attention to material things came 
out of this laboratory of freedom. An analysis 
of some of these traits is made by Professor Max 
Farrand in his excellent brief summary of American 
history, "The Development of the United States." 
He says: "At the basis lay the qualities of bravery, 
resourcefulness and self-reliance which were in- 
dispensable to the maintenance of life on the frontier, 
and all America passed through the frontier stage. 
Adaptability was a product rather than an original 
quality. . . . One of the shrewdest character- 
izations ever made was that an American likes better 
than anything else to make a dollar where no one 
else has seen the chance or where somebody else 
has failed. ... It is easy to see how out of the 
conditions existing other traits developed such as 
cheerfulness, good nature, generosity, and above all, 
a deeply rooted belief in an opportunity for every 
man, a conviction which ultimately led to the 
principle of fair play and the doctrine of the square 
deal. 

" Still other characteristics sprang from the youth- 
fulness of the people. ... A sense of humor is 
conspicuous in American temperament, and whether 
it comes from an appreciation of the incongruous or 



26 THE NEW FRONTIER 

from scorn of any lack of adaptability, from a 
'magnificent spirit of exaggeration,' from a surplus 
of nervous energy seeking relief, or from any other 
of the numerous explanations, the necessary con- 
ditions seemed to exist in the new country." 

The youthfulness of point of view is particularly 
worthy of emphasis. In a life which involved the 
stimulus of a constant renewal of scene and effort, 
we have seen that Washington and Lincoln had 
both won their spurs as commanders of troops at 
the age of twenty-two. Alexander Hamilton was 
Secretary of the Treasury at twenty-five. Thomas 
Jefferson was Governor of Virginia at thirty-six. 
Theodore Roosevelt was a member of the New 
York Legislature at twenty-eight. There is in this 
long record of public service by youthful men, and 
an equal number of men mature in years but young 
in spirit, an interesting emphasis upon the joy of 
life which everyone feels who comes in contact with 
American affairs. There is still notable among us 
a considerable absence of the sophistication which 
centuries of struggle and tragedy have left as an 
inheritance to the people of many countries. There 
goes with this a whole-hearted love of play and a 
considerable lack of self-consciousness. The crowd 
at a country fair, at a base-ball or foot-ball game, 
in any one of a thousand American communities, 
the enthusiasm of great accomplishment of the part 
of men in high position, the quick reaction to gen- 
erous impulse, all of which one finds to a notable 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 27 

extent in America, are some of the characteristics 
of the nation and its people. They have their 
origin in the life and spirit of the frontier. - 

Is it not evident that the frontier carries a great 
inspiration lesson for the present generation? The 
last material frontier has been conquered and the 
forests have all been explored. The waste lands are 
all charted and crossed by countless trails, and 
simply await the necessities of our expanding civili- 
zation to be subdued by the mechanical processes 
of irrigation. Nevertheless, America has just begun 
to face the test of her strength. A nation of a few 
millions of people on the Atlantic coast has expanded 
into more than a hundred millions, and the very 
problems of existence are again, as in the frontier 
day, taxing to the utmost the ingenuity and the 
self-reliance of our leaders. Was there ever a time 
when self-reHance was more needed? Are not 
cheerfulness and the American sense of humor de- 
manded? Was there ever an era in which a con- 
tinental viewpoint, a firm rehance upon the orderly 
processes of democracy, and a high idealism were 
more vital? 

We have just stood before the world in a great 
war as the advocates of straightfo inwardness and 
fair dealing. The relations between man and man 
which were reduced to their lowest terms in the 
hard school of the frontier, the political practice of 
going straight to the point, free of all diplomatic 
subterfuge, which characterized the public life of 



28 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the frontier's greatest son, Abraham Lincoln, which 
characterized the diplomacy of Roosevelt, were 
again set before the world in the war against Ger- 
many, when we advocated the rights of small 
nations to determine the life they should lead. 
Among the diplomatic messages of the great war 
some of the American notes stand out as profoundly 
characteristic of the American spirit, and they are 
characteristic, not because of anything new in them, 
but because their roots lie back in the days when 
our people were fighting out their destiny across a 
great continent. "As we turn from the task of the 
first rough conquest of the continent there lies be- 
fore us a whole wealth of unexploited resources in 
the realm of the spirit." 

It is unfortunately true that in the age we live 
in, the formal rehgion of many people is dormant; 
yet the^human tendency to set up something worthy 
of reverence, something consecrated, something 
worshipful, is partly satisfied by their love of de- 
mocracy. A thousand people may give a thousand 
definitions of what democracy really means, but 
fundamentally in this country there is a long tradi- 
tion of deep respect for the orderly processes of 
legislation, for the give and take of discussion and 
disagreement over a daily succession of theories and 
suggested reforms, all finally resulting in putting it 
to a vote, announcing the awesome words, "The 
motion is carried," and turning to the next business. 

It is a feature of this method of action that it has 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 29 

behind it the abihty to back up words with deeds. 
This is essential. But the willingness in an ex- 
tremity to fight for principles which are beheved to 
be sound, the early frontier spirit of bravado, pos- 
sibly the over-readiness to fight, all these would 
have but little in them of truth for our present day 
and generation unless out of the strength of the 
physical frontier had quickly developed the principle 
that right is mighty and that the eternal truth of 
things is not conclusively proved by the strong man 
knocking the weaker man to the ground and beat- 
ing him into unconsciousness. Those in whose con- 
ception the democratic ideal is strongest have a 
firm conviction that in America raw force is just 
a Httle better under control than it is in some 
corners of the world, that among us, self-reliant 
men are just a little more inclined to do the 
right thing because it is right and not because 
they are required to do it by law or by force. 
It is an open question how many more lynchings 
and murders and riots and other kinds of mob 
violence we must submit to before we reach an era 
in which the faith of these idealists of democracy 
may be fully justified. But let it be hoped that 
those who believe that the minds of Americans can 
permanently be shaped by violence will give thought 
before it is too late to the enthusiasm, and even the 
fanaticism, that so often underHe a conviction as 
closely akin to religion as is our devotion to tradi- 
tional American democracy. Let those persons who 



30 THE NEW FRONTIER 

believe they can substitute a rule of might for a 
rule of reason beware of wounding public sentiment 
too far, lest a red flame flash out of the pioneer 
American heart and wholly consume them. Ameri- 
can democracy is quite as capable of inspiring end- 
less enthusiasm and devotion as are the systems 
which would destroy it. 

The rugged and simple Americanism of the 
frontier, expressing itself in practical politics, is 
exemphfied in the hfe and thought of Abraham 
Lincoln. In him we feel a deep love of the essence 
of America which we all fail to keep before us as 
vividly as we might. Often we do not appreciate 
it because we are so close to it that we see the im- 
perfections more vividly than we do the broad, 
underlying principles which make America what it 
is and what it signifies to the outside world. It 
is a world spirit. It stands vividly and compellingly 
before the immigrant who leaves his home and 
crosses a continent and an ocean to become part of 
it. This subtle force has never been described 
better than by Lord Charnwood in his splendid 
"Life of Lincoln" where, in speaking of the Civil 
War, he says, "It must never be forgotten, if we 
wish to enter into the spirit which sustained the 
North in its struggle, that loyalty for union had a 
larger aspect than that of mere allegiance to a 
particular authority. Vividly present to the mind 
of some few, vaguely but honestly present to the 
mind of a great multitude, was the sense that even 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 31 

had slavery not entered into the question, a larger 
cause than that of their recent Union was bound 
up in the issues of the war. The Government of 
the United States had been the first and most 
famous attempt in a great modern country to secure 
government by the will of a mass of the people. 
If, in this crucial instance, such a government were 
soon to be intolerably weak, if it was found to be 
at the mercy of the first powerful minority which 
seized a worked-up occasion to rebel, what they had 
learned to think the most powerful agency for the 
uplifting of man everywhere would, for ages to come, 
have proved a failure." 

Our race has not declined. The war gave evidence 
of the splendid manhood, equal to any in the world, 
available to fight when fight we must. But rarely, 
we hope, will this generation or its successors be 
called upon to muster its full physical strength to 
confront in arms the problems which oppress the 
world. Here at home the physical frontiers are gone. 
The forests which remain are scarcely an adequate 
playground for the teeming millions of today. But 
the great frontier of American character, the endless 
succession of frontiers of our own time, all men must 
recognize. The ancient strength is still at the 
heart of our people. Face to face with a new wilder- 
ness of trackless problems of the spirit, confronted by 
the task of blazing trails through uncharted regions, 
social, industrial, financial, political, we shall show 
the same skill, the same patience and adaptability, 



32 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the same self-confidence which characterized the men 
who made America, The greatest inheritance of a 
man or woman in the United States is the conscious- 
ness of the victories of the men and women who 
went before. 

If sojourners from overseas are working among us 
to perpetuate other traditions, we must spare no 
pains to teach them our own. We must instil into 
them the enthusiasm for the ideals and traditions 
which win from us not the tribute, of lip service 
but the changeless devotion which can be inspired 
only by those things which are worthy and of good 
report; we must teach the new Americans an un- 
conquerable faith, not in the frozen and inelastic 
detail of institutions, but in the vigorous, youthful 
heart of America. In the great days, the strenuous 
and trying days, which lie ahead, we may well look 
upon the lives of the men and women who blazed 
the way for us; we can throw back our shoulders 
and hold up our heads and look the world in the 
eye with pride because we are the heirs of the spirit 
of the frontier, the inheritors of the tradition of 
those men and women who, being thrown upon 
their own resources in a vast continental wilderness, 
instead of degenerating into the savagery which 
surrounded them, laid the foundations of the greatest 
republic on any continent. 

Throughout our entire history there is the ring of 
necessary work triumphantly done, of creative en- 
thusiasm, of the energies of men brought to bear 



FRONTIER OF AMERICAN CHARACTER 33 

upon generations of effort which to another race 
might have seemed only impossible drudgery. It is 
the frontier spirit which Roosevelt knew so well. It 
is the spirit interpreted in the sentences of Emerson 
Hough: *'The frontier! there is no word in the 
English language more stirring, more intimate, or 
more beloved. ... It carries all of the old Saxon 
command, 'Forward.' It means all that America 
ever meant. It means the old hope of a real personal 
liberty, and yet a real human advance in character 
and achievement. To a genuine American it is the 
dearest word in all the world. 

"The fascination of the frontier has ever been 
and is an undying thing. Adventure s the meat of 
the strong men who have built the world for those 
more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one 
and inseparable. They suggest strength, courage, 
hardihood — qualities beloved in men since the 
world began, qualities which are the very soul of 
the United States, itself an experiment, an adventure, 
a risk accepted. . . . We had our frontier. We 
shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its 
dreams." 

And we still have our frontier. It is a frontier 
industrial, financial, commercial, political, social, 
educational, artistic, diplomatic, religious. Let 
us not forget that the old frontier constantly 
presented problems without precedent. It seemed 
to be impossible of conquest and settlement. But 
settled it was. If we do not "forget and abandon 



34 THE NEW FRONTIER 

its strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid 
dreams," if we do not lose our grasp upon its vigor 
and common sense, if we do not forsake our price- 
less heritage of a sense of humor, we shall find that 
we are measurably nearer the settlement of the new 
wilderness, that we are steadily pushing forward the 
fighting line of the New Frontier. 



THE LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 

Occasionally the world produces a man who does 
not need to read history. He is history. Like the 
youth in the essay of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "In 
the sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the 
Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has 
brought home to the surrounding woods the faint 
roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches 
in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's 
day. What filled it? The crowded orders, the stem 
decisions, the foreign dispatches, the Castillian 
etiquette? The soul answers — Behold his day here! 
In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these 
gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these 
northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the 
maidens you meet, — in the hopes of the morning, 
the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; 
in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at 
want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execu- 
tion, — behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, 
yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, 
Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day 
of all that are born of women. The difference of 
circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the 

3S 



36 THE NEW FRONTIER 

self-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its 
pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not 
foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past what 
it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of that 
day, called Byron or Burke; — but ask it of the 
enveloping Now ... Be lord of a day, and you 
can put up your history books." 

Men and women, not books, make history. Re- 
corded history is largely the story of human achieve- 
ments and failures. It has been said that in the 
biographies of its men and women may be read all 
that is essential in the chronicles of a nation. 

And yet we are the product of the past. No great 
race can be unmindful of the history of its founders. 
What Emerson dreamed, what Lincoln suffered, 
what Roosevelt did, all have a bearing on what we 
are and what we do today. All that the pioneers 
accomplished is a precious and inspiring heritage for 
the men and women of our own time. The spirit 
that conquered a continent must never die. 

We cannot appreciate this spirit fully unless we 
understand it clearly. We have not allowed the 
fame of our great men to grow dim; but have we 
not been satisfied in this generation with too super- 
ficial a view of those whose lives embody the living 
fire of liberty and democracy and opportunity? 
Have we not, in our busy times, inclined too much 
to use the names of Jefferson and Washington and 
Lincoln as connoting abstract patriotic sentiments, 
and largely failed to clothe these men with red- 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 37 

blooded personal attributes? It will be helpful to 
get acquainted with some of our forefathers. 

This is, perhaps, reason enough for advocating a 
wider reading of American history and biography. 
But it is not the primary reason which it is desired 
to emphasize in these pages. The first reason for 
reading the history of the United States is because 
of its absorbing interest. This interest lies not only 
in its variety and sweep and human vigor, but 
particularly for Americans in the fact that it deals 
with the actions of men who met, in a variety of 
forms, problems similar to those which confront us 
in our own day. 

It may be offered as a general assertion that the 
average mature American of today knows too little 
about the history of his own country. This is partly 
due to the fact that we have been too busy to be very 
analytical about ourselves or our own past doings, 
and it is perhaps due even more to the fact that 
only recently have we become of age. For perhaps 
two hundred years after the settlement of America, 
European standards and traditions had their way 
with us, and in a work-a-day country where practical 
matters were the most important consideration, the 
few men who had time to read or write history 
turned their attention as a sort of poetic relief to 
the highly colored and melodramatic phases of Euro- 
pean progress. Many Americans wrote brilliantly 
in their chosen fields. Prescott was absorbed by 
the Spanish tradition. He has left us a vivid charac- 



38 THE NEW FRONTIER 

terizatlon of the Spanish Court in its most brilHant 
days; but he has touched upon America only in 
connection with the romantic episodes surrounding 
the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro to the south- 
ward. Washington Irving felt the lure of Spain. 
Motley, with a firm conviction that everything 
connected with republican endeavor must be sound 
and just, left us an entertaining if somewhat preju- 
diced account of the rise of the Dutch Republic. 

Nor was this alien tendency due alone to the fact 
that European events were superficially more bril- 
liant. It was due partly to an historical tradition 
which laid the greatest possible emphasis upon con- 
ventional, political and military developments, in 
comparison with which, of course, the little contests 
connected with the foundation and development of 
the United States seemed insignificant. It is only 
in our own time that writers of history are giving 
due credit to the progress of human character. Pro- 
fessor W. C. Abbott of Yale, in his "Expansion of 
Europe" has set forth this new point of view as 
brilliantly as any modern writer. All through his 
two strikingly vivid volumes he lays emphasis upon 
history as a chronicle of the development of the 
mind of man, as a record of the advance of living 
and thinking men and women, rather than as a 
bluebook of dynastic quarrels and royal marriages. 
*' If there is one characteristic of European peoples," 
he says, "more extraordinary than another in the 
field of intellect, it is the amazing discrepancy be- 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 39 

tween their actual and their recorded history. Had 
their development been confined to those concerns 
which filled their annals to the exclusion of almost 
every other topic — the ambitions and activities of 
their rulers, war and diplomacy — the story of the 
three hundred years which culminated in the careers 
of Louis XIV and Charles XII would resemble 
nothing so much as the accounts of the rise and fall 
of Tartar and Zulu tribes; the exploits of Jenghiz 
Khan and Timur the Lame; of Chaka and Dingaan. 
Where there are a score of volumes on the elaborate 
and, for the most part, futile intrigues over the dis- 
position of the inheritance of Charles II of Spain, 
there is scarcely one on the evolution, in the same 
period, of the mightiest agent of the modern world, 
the steam engine. Where there are a hundred 
narratives of the battles of the wars with which 
the Eighteenth Century began, there is hardly to 
be found a tolerable account of that economic 
revolution which then commenced to alter the whole 
basis of civilized society." 

' He refers also to the progress of chemistry, par- 
ticularly the work in the middle of the eighteenth 
century of the Swedish pharmacist Scheele, whose 
discoveries included the organic acids, such as 
tartaric, oxalic, citric, and gallic; manganese, 
chlorine, baryta; and estimates of the proportion of 
oxygen in the air. "With this work modern chemis- 
try may be said to begin. And while it is futile to 
make the trite moral comparison between the labors 



40 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of such men as these and the spectacular achieve- 
ments of captains and kings, in their respective 
contributions to the comfort and capacity of the 
race, one may at least claim a place for them in the 
history of Europe beside the mistresses of Louis XV 
or even the conquests of the great Frederick." 

Professor Abbott does not advocate the changing 
of human nature. The vividness and sympathy 
with which he writes prove beyond peradventure 
that he has a keen appreciation of the love in every 
man of a good story — of great battles lost and won, 
of epic chronicles of courage and of daring. But he 
believes that modern history has a responsibility in 
the way of clarifying the fundamental significance 
of the best experience of the race so that this sig- 
nificance may be understood by men who are not 
engaged primarily in leading great armies in the 
field of battle but, on the contrary, are devoting 
most of their time to leading men and women in 
the no less difficult fields of action which charac- 
terize modern life in times of peace. In setting forth 
this view, one of the best things that can be said 
about Professor Abbott is that he has demonstrated 
not only the possibility, but also the brilliant realiza- 
tion, of just what he advocates in principle. The 
following paragraph will summarize his views on 
this point and will perhaps indicate his equipment 
as a representative of the modern school of American 
writers of history whose work it is a pleasure to 
read. 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 41 

"To most men no literary art can make (the 
chronicles of artists, inventors and thinkers) com- 
parable in interest with the dramatic vividness of 
battles lost and won, of great designs carried to 
victory or to defeat, of the unending human comedy 
and tragedy whose conflicts form the undying 
theme of human interest. The study can never 
compete with the field of battle as the subject of 
history. Yet, in a wider view, the multitudinous 
activities of these untitled leaders in the common 
cause of humanity, engaged in this great conflict 
with the forces of ignorance and the dark, the 
struggle of these champions of liberty with those of 
intrenched dogma and autocracy and these dis- 
coverers of new knowledge and new power, take on 
an aspect no less dramatic and far more important 
to the cause of progress than all the glittering 
triumphs of statesmen and generals. For the cause 
which they championed, the interest which they 
served, are those which went to make the world we 
call our own. . . . And in the fields of knowledge 
and capacity, popular government and freedom of 
thought, these pioneers of the forces of light drove 
their mines deep under that stately edifice of worldly 
power which, at the height of his glory, the Grand 
Monarque was raising before the eyes of men. That 
edifice was to endure scarcely a century. To its 
fall, as to the structure which arose in its place, it 
was the glory of these leaders of thought to con- 
tribute; and from their eflPorts rather than from the 



42 THE NEW FRONTIER 

achievements of those who filled the world's eye, 
came the next advance in the real progress of man- 
kind." 

The new American history, therefore, takes into 
account many developments and movements of the 
human race which are attended perhaps with less of 
the colorful and melodramatic than one finds in the 
average page of European history. The contrast 
is something like that between the pageantry and 
tinsel of a highly staged melodrama and the sim- 
plicity of a Ben Greet production of Shakespeare. 
Or perhaps, for Americans it might be better to 
contrast the shock and color of a conflict between 
a field of men in armor, with their vast array of 
heraldic standards and burnished steel flashing in 
the sun, and on the other hand the quiet, stealthy 
gray-brown progress of a group of backwoodsmen 
trailing through the forest to meet a band of Indians 
on the warpath; or more recently, the men in 
khaki who won new glory for the name "American" 
on the battlefields of France. This contrast perhaps 
brings out as well as anything could the feeling of 
the lover of American history for the chronicles of 
his own country. He feels that, after all, the most 
interesting story is the one which touches most 
frequently the springs of that human action and 
human feeling which we ourselves can understand. 
He believes that there was at least as much of 
poetry and fire and dramatic colorfulness in the 
fighting Americans at Belleau Wood as there was in 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 43 

the gaily decked warriors who led the crusades of 
other days. 

But there is another point. American history is 
the history of our own people, the people whose 
blood runs in our veins, the people whose actions 
and reactions have shaped our own life and character 
and who have handed down to us an atmosphere 
and tradition which, in spite of ourselves, will largely 
shape our attitude toward the problems of the future. 
It is true that the leadership of today must face a 
variety of problems, national and international in 
scope, which will require originality of treatment 
and a fresh imagination; but certainly this leader- 
ship will always need that deep and permanent 
confidence in itself, that courage and conviction in 
the soundness of one's country and its people, and 
the lightness of its manifest destiny, which have 
their roots so deep in the heart of American tradi- 
tion. We have happily left behind us the time when 
it was regarded as fashionable to entertain a certain 
condescension toward our own history. 

First of all there is the background. American his- 
tory is not an isolated growth, but a chronicle of a 
portion of the human race; and just as the American 
of today can understand himself better by know- 
ing his ancestors of the past two centuries, so Ameri- 
cans of all times may gain something by the study 
of the history of other peoples. Probably the best 
brief analysis of this background is "The Expansion 
of Europe" by W. C. Abbott, previously referred 



44 THE NEW FRONTIER 

to. Dr. Abbott, as an American, recognizes fully 
the significance of colonial expansion in the develop- 
ment of the modern world and sets forth brilliantly 
the influence of the Age of Discovery in expanding 
the thought of Europe, and laying the foundations 
upon which America was built. The early history 
of the American continent starts off in a period of 
the affairs of the world which has no superior in 
romantic interest. The stirrings among the more 
liberal spirits of Europe following the enlightened 
days of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the 
fascinating and almost unbelievable story of Marco 
Polo, the successful series of great adventures 
launched under Prince Henry the Navigator, which 
brought the East in touch with Europe by sea, the 
addition to the humdrum daily life of Europe of 
articles whose very name is the fabric of romance, 
formed a lively setting for the discovery of the 
West Indies by Columbus. Columbus was moved 
by a desire to find a short route to India and to 
bring to Spain something of the wealth which the 
Portuguese ships were bringing in around the Cape 
of Good Hope, cloths of silk and gold, ginger, 
Brazil wood, sandalwood, diamonds from Golconda, 
rubies, topaz, sapphires and pearls, rich tapestries 
and priceless rugs. 

In the first chapter of his "Beginnings of the 
American People" Professor Carl Becker has painted 
a picture of these visions of wealth and luxury 
which filled the minds of the men of the latter part 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 45 

of the Fifteenth Century: "Walles of silver and 
bulwarkes or towers of golde . . . lakes full of 
pearls, Indian princes wearing on their arms 'golde 
and gems worth a city's ransome.'" And so the 
story goes of great palaces with stairs of silver and 
pavements of silver and gold, and walls sealed over 
with plates of beaten gold. "In contrast," he 
continues, "how small and inferior is Europe. Here 
was Eldorado, a symbol of all external and objective 
values which so fired the imagination in that age of 
discovery; presenting a concrete and visualized 
goal, . . . attainable not by contemplation but by 
active endeavor; fascinating alike to the merchant 
dreaming of profits, to the statesman intent on 
conquest, to the priest in search of martyrdom, to 
the adventurer in search of gold." 

This was indeed a Frontier! Out of this great 
stirring came pioneers. Their motives ran the 
gamut from the deepest spiritual and missionary 
purpose to the most unvarnished and insatiable 
greed; but underneath it all there stands a spirit 
of adventure, of conquest, even of idealism which 
must be reckoned with among the elements which 
went into the shaping of what we know as the 
American character. It was this spirit that became 
more sharply defined in the days of Raleigh, Drake 
and Hawkins and translated itself into the splendid 
national spirit of the age of Elizabeth. 

Alfred Noyes has written, "There had been 
legends and fairy tales of happy islands where men 



46 THE NEW FRONTIER 

walked with gods as with their elder brothers, but 
never before had there been such a revolution of 
miraculous realities, for here was discovery on dis- 
covery of unimagined oceans and continents. Veil 
after veil was withdrawn only to make more mys- 
terious the veils beyond. It was as if men were 
sailing out into the vastness of the eternal. 

"Never before had it been possible to sit in a 
tavern and hear from the lips of those who had 
sailed beyond the utmost limits of the old world 
that the fairy tales were infinitely less marvelous 
than the truth. ... It was as if men had suddenly 
discovered that their earth was after all, not a thing 
of make believe, a dust-bin of customs and groups, 
but a real island floating in the mystery of an 
infinite heaven. 

i "It was seriously discussed in the little black 
taverns *at the latter end of a sea coal fire' whether 
men might not sail straight up to the gates of 
Paradise. The Bible and the map, in Hakluyt's 
phrase 'had opened doors for them.' 

"But for the greater intellects of the time it 
meant an even more vivid revolution of the isola- 
tion of their little hearth fires in an unfathomable 
universe. It meant a spiritual voyage through 
an immeasurable abyss of darkness in quest of a 
spiritual Cathay." 

This stirring spirit sought out the utmost confines 
of the world and brought our own continent within 
the knowledge of men. It is well in estimating this 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 47 

spirit to which we owe so much in the development 
of America, to reaHze that it was not from England 
alone but from the whole of Europe that we in- 
herited the tradition of restless quests for new worlds 
to conquer. While the early permanent colonies, 
which won their independence and became the 
United States, were predominently English in tradi- 
tion, and while we have the right to claim a spiritual 
connection with some of the proud traditions of 
British constitutional liberty, we have seen that the 
men who developed the first characteristically Ameri- 
can spirit were not the colonial Englishmen of the 
seacoast, but a mixed race. It is significant to 
bear in mind also that the great number of early 
explorers who revealed this continent to the im- 
agination of Europe were largely continental Euro- 
peans. Columbus was a Genoese boy who, at the 
age of twenty-one, declared before a notary that 
he was by trade a weaver. The spirit abroad in the 
land developed in him, living as he did in a famous 
maritime city, a love of going out onto the sea in 
ships, and on one of these trips he was wrecked and 
landed on the coast of Portugal. When he developed 
his project for a westward voyage he tried in vain 
to get support from the rulers of Portugal, England 
and France, and finally after a persistency which 
has scarcely ever been equaled, he managed to 
sail under the flag of Spain. John Cabot was a 
Genoese boy who later became a Venetian citizen 
and finally sailed under the English flag; but in 



48 THE NEW FRONTIER 

landing on the coast of America he was careful to 
have with him the flag of Venice. Amerigo Vespucci 
was a Florentine who sailed under the flag of 
Portugal. 

The pageantry of early American history is 
distinctly international in coloring. It is, perhaps, 
hard to visualize the brilliant band of men in full 
armor with all the colorful standards of the noble 
families of Spain marching across the present State 
of Georgia to the banks of the Mississippi under 
DeSoto. It is perhaps difficult to call up the picture 
of LaSalle, the French courtier, after an incredibly 
difficult canoe trip, landing among the Huron 
Indians in the unbroken wilderness of the region of 
the Great Lakes, stepping out of a birch canoe in 
the green forest among naked and painted savages, 
dressed in the red coat and breeches, patent leather 
shoes with silver buckles, lace ruffles, and cocked 
hat of the French Court. Or to come down to more 
modern times, how many of us have visualized the 
battle in the peaceful mountains of Vermont between 
the rugged American hill farmers and the stolid 
Brunswickers; or the battles further South with the 
well-drilled troops sent over by the Landgrave of 
Hesse-Cassel ? Their descendants might well have 
inherited a memory of American fighting ability 
which would have averted some of the surprise 
which modem Germans felt when they met the 
descendants of Ethan Allen and his associates in 
France in 191 8. 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 49 

In the early years of American history there are 
periods which are chiefly interesting to the student 
of constitutional development; but the man who 
has never felt the thrill and sweep of the story 
which Francis Parkman has told in his great series 
of histories covering the Jesuits in North America 
and the exploits and adventures of the men who 
opened up Canada and the Northwest, has missed 
one of the passages in all history which is most 
fascinating and most significant. The stage was 
set for a great epic. The arena was a continent. 
The British zone of interest on the Atlantic coast 
was bordered by a vigorous and ambitious group 
of French on the North, and a proud and determined 
group of Spaniards on the South and West, while 
in the extreme Northwest the Russians had obtained 
a foothold and were laying their plans to press 
South and East. All the elements were there for a 
repetition of the partition by Europe of this continent 
along the lines familiar in other sections of the 
world. What checked this ambitious progress? 
The development of the American nation cannot be 
explained on the basis of so many thousands of 
soldiers and so many pounds of powder. American 
history could never have shaped itself as it has 
without a marked element of the spirit of adventure 
and self-reliance out of which had come the dis- 
covery of the continent and which had established 
itself in the very bone and sinew of the early 
settlers. 



50 THE NEW FRONTIER 

Finally the main lines are laid. The Spanish, 
the French, the English influence plays each its 
part, along with the Scotch, the Irish and the 
Welsh. Then we have the Dutch and the Swedish 
and the Russian touches and the influences exerted 
by our contacts with the Indians, the Mexicans, the 
Negroes; and finally the Germans who were repre- 
sented by thousands of men and women seeking to 
escape the tyranny of home conditions. At length 
the Republic establishes itself as an independent 
state, and we see the infant nation struggling 
through the dark years which followed the Revolu- 
tion, the critical period of American history which led 
to the establishment of the Constitution. Roughly, 
the period from the inauguration of Washington 
in 1788 to the end of the administration of John 
Quincy Adams in 1829 forms a division easily re- 
membered. Then comes Andrew Jackson. The 
period thus inaugurated, including the rise of the 
vigorous Democratic sentiment, leads us up to the 
end of the administration of Buchanan in 1861. 
Another great sweep takes us from the inauguration 
of Lincoln in 1861 to the end of the administration 
of Grant in 1877 when the last Union troops were 
withdrawn from the South. And finally there is 
the period of growing national consciousness from 
the inauguration of Hayes in 1877 to the end of the 
administration of President Taft in 191 3. These 
four periods are crowded with interest. The sahent 
facts are easy to grasp; but only in our own time 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 51 

has the story begun to be told in a way which com- 
bines interest with an accurate regard for the facts. 
With the modern development of a group of vigorous 
and sound historical writers, the last reason has 
disappeared for a profound ignorance of American 
history on the part of men and women who claim 
to love America and to believe in the institutions so 
slowly and bravely established by a vigorous line 
of splendid dreamers and fighters. 

It may be of interest to dwell for a moment on 
the question of American historical writing. Theo- 
dore Roosevelt was always deeply interested in this 
subject and was able to set a good example himself 
in writing history which was both accurate and 
interesting. In 191 2 as president of the American 
Historical Association he delivered an address which 
has since become famous under the title of " History 
as Literature." He admits the possibility that the 
essentials of sound education and democratic citizen- 
ship may be taught through the use of a book which 
lacks literary quality, but he vigorously opposes 
those critics who seem to feel that because a book 
is readable it immediately comes under suspicion 
on the part of scientific historians. "There are in- 
numerable books," he says, "that is, innumerable 
volumes of printed matter between covers which are 
excellent for their own purposes, but in which 
imagination would be as wholly out of place as In 
the blue-prints of a sewer system, or in the photo- 
graphs taken to illustrate a work on comparative 



52 THE NEW FRONTIER 

osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system 
does not take the place of the Cathedral of Rheims 
or of the Parthenon; no quantity of photographs 
will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt, and the 
greatest mass of data, although indispensable to 
the work of a great historian, is in no shape or way 
a substitute for that work." 

The situation with regard to historical writing in 
America was recently discussed in an illuminating 
way by Dr. M. N. Quaife in the Mississippi Valley 
Historical Review. He calls attention to the fact 
that in the early days of historical writing in this 
country leading historians were regarded as men 
of letters, a school of which Francis Parkman was 
the last and greatest. "For a full generation now," 
he states, "the historical profession in America has 
been dominated by a different type of scholar. 
With the exception of libraries and the development 
of higher institutions of learning, with the growth 
of graded departments in scores of universities and 
colleges, the writing of history has become an 
adjunct to the teaching of history in these institu- 
tions. More and more it has fallen into the hands 
of the specialist whose work as a writer is financed, 
not from the sale of his writings, but by the monthly 
stipend for teaching in the institution which sup- 
ports him. . . . Emancipated from the necessity of 
winning the favor of their readers (or indeed of 
winning readers at all) . . . our university his- 
torians have divorced history from literature and in 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 53 

their zeal for the pursuit of facts have ignored the 
end of presenting these facts in acceptable literary 
form. As a consequence, the modern American 
historian has lost in the main, as he deserves to lose, 
the attention of the reading pubhc." 

This analysis by Dr. Quaife may be supplemented 
by calling attention to the fact that the preparation 
of an adequate discussion of any substantial period 
of American history is not an easy task. It is the 
work of a hfetime. Henry Adams has given us 
nine small volumes covering a period of sixteen 
years, the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, 
which James Ford Rhodes in a letter characterizes 
as the best piece of historical writing done by an 
American. Adams refers to himself in this language: 
"Adams had given ten or a dozen years to Jefferson 
and Madison, with expenses which in any mercantile 
business could hardly have been reckoned at less 
than ^100,000, at a salary of $5,000 a year; and 
when he asked what return he got from this ex- 
penditure, rather more extravagant in proportion to 
his means than a racing stable, he could see none 
whatever. Such works never return money. Even 
Frank Parkman never printed a first edition of his 
relatively cheap and popular volumes numbering 
more than seven hundred copies until quite at the 
end of his life." 

Mr. Rhodes has set an example of public service 
in retiring from a successful business and devoting 
twenty years to the preparation of seven brilliant 



54 THE NEW FRONTIER 

and highly readable volumes covering the period 
from 1850 to 1877. The last volume of this history 
was pubhshed in 1906 and Mr. Rhodes was pre- 
vented from continuing this work by the popular 
demand for public lectures and for a single volume 
on the Civil War. He has only recently been able 
to complete and pubHsh his final volume, bringing 
the narrative from 1877 down to the administration 
of President McKinley. The nation is richer be- 
cause of the existence of these splendid volumes. 

The study of American history cannot fail to be 
an unceasing inspiration to Americans. To leaders 
of American thought a knowledge of the nation's 
history is, and always has been, a necessary equip- 
ment, and it is easier today than it has ever been to 
get a working knowledge of the great subject from 
brief and readable sources. Of course, one must live 
with it and become a part of it in order to love it; 
it is not a work which can be accomplished in a day; 
it can be fully acquired only through the companion- 
ship of a lifetime. But amid the variety of publica- 
tions with which an intelligent man must maintain 
a working familiarity, there is perhaps no greater 
joy than to have a living and constantly expanding 
subject so close to his heart — a hobby, a source of 
perpetual enjoyment; and in days of temporary 
discouragement and weariness of the spirit a source 
of fresh inspiration, confidence and hope. 

In the history of America is the story of a new 
nation, and indeed of a new world — a living record 



LEADERSHIP THAT MADE AMERICA 55 

not of man's devices, but of man. In the words of 
James Russell Lowell: 

"O strange New World that yit wast never 

young, 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was 

wrung, 
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's crackHn' 

tread, 
And who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants 

an' pains. 
Nursed by stern men with empires in their 

brains, 
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain 
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane; 
Thou skilled by Freedom and by great events 
To pitch new states ez Old World men pitch 

tents, 
Thou taught by fate to know Jehovah's plan, 
Thet man's devices can't unmake a man." 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 

Inflexibility of purpose, a dogged determination 
to get forward, enforced by exceptional vigor and 
vitality, was a prominent characteristic of the frontier 
American. This fixity of purpose was not of the 
grim gloomy sort. It was relieved by an abundant 
sense of humor — and a sense of humor is a sense of 
proportion, a willingness to compromise, a demand 
for results, "an idealism with a genius for the 
practical." 

This is the attitude of mind which has come to be 
known as liberal. It implies vigorous convictions, 
tolerance for the opinions of others, and a persistent 
desire for sound progress. It is a method of approach 
which has played a notable and constructive part in 
our history, and which merits a thorough trial today 
in the attack on our absorbingly interesting American 
task. 

Let us try to define this useful word liberal. The 
Standard Dictionary has it that to be liberal is to 
be "free from narrowness, bigotry, or bondage to 
authority or creed, as in religion; inclined to demo- 
cratic or republican ideas, as opposed to monarchical 
or aristocratic, as in politics; broad, popular, pro- 
gressive; free, from birth; manifesting a free and 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 57 

generous heart." A study of contemporary editorial 
writing, which fairly represents contemporary usage 
reveals a constant use of the word as descriptive of 
the attitude of the average vigorous thoughtful 
person, patriotic, tolerant, and eager for results. It 
is the attitude of the great portion of the population 
who, after the merits of a question have been fully 
discussed by the extremists, both reactionary and 
radical, want to see if something can be done about 
it, if any action is called for. 

To define the hberal, and to point out the need 
for a keener and more complete organization of effort 
on the part of liberals, is not to criticise the extrem- 
ists. The ground is plowed up by the specialists 
in reforms and Utopias. But when their new republic 
is completely set forth in theory, the workaday 
world needs specialists in applied idealism, specialists 
in the work of keeping the wheels in motion; it is 
the liberal who determines how much or how little 
of the radical's dream can actually be translated into 
useful action. 

America has urgent need today for the liberal 
group. This group must be mobilized and recognized 
for what it is, with its responsibilities clearly defined. 
The radicals are recognized as radicals; generally 
they are willing to be called radicals; but now and 
then they encroach on the precincts of the middle 
group. For example we hear of the Harvard Liberal 
Club, which would seem, in fact, to be a Harvard 
Radical Club. It is important that the younger men, 



58 THE NEW FRONTIER 

in and out of the colleges, should stand forth frankly 
for what they are. The radicals have their place; 
but a plea is here made for a substantial number of 
organized liberals among the men who are to be the 
leaders of the future. There will always be a good 
supply of young men who are anxious to reform the 
world forthwith. The supply will never fail of those 
who enter the world of affairs committed to the 
preservation of things as they are. Between these 
two groups we need men who will see the world as 
a whole, men who realize that preservation of essen- 
tial institutions in a changing world means the careful 
and practical adaptation of those institutions to 
modern needs. In short we require men to whom the 
leaders of industry and government today can hand 
over the great working machinery which mankind 
has devised to feed and clothe itself under conditions 
of law and order. 

The outstanding men of America today, par- 
ticularly the business men, are not unaware of the 
changing temper of the times. It is a notable fact 
that much of the most substantial and permanent 
progress has come out of the thought and effort of 
practical men of affairs. Such progress is sure. It 
is slow, often too slow for the temper and patience 
of some eras. The war has so stimulated the thought 
and self-consciousness and aspiration of the world 
that this orderly progress is too slow for an active 
minority of men today. The cry of "speed up" is 
ringing round the world. It touches a responsive 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 59 

cord in every right-minded person and it must be 
considered. 

And yet, in our efforts to heed this demand, we 
must recognize its dangers. Such recognition points 
at once to the need for the Hberal mind and for the 
leader of hberal training. It is an inexorable law of 
progress that great and reasonably lasting changes 
involving the relationships of men cannot be hastily 
effected. Any attempt to rush the world simply 
affords excitement for the impatient. In spite of 
temporary unrepresentative legislation, in the long 
run only such reform as has the deep sanction of the 
minds and hearts of the majority of people can 
establish itself as an integral part of what we know 
as the civilizing progress of the race. 

The deduction from this may well be that man- 
kind as a whole is not radical. It may prove further 
the necessity for liberal thinking to prevent the con- 
servative tendency of the race from degenerating to 
inertia. We need keen and alert critics of the world 
as it is. We need eloquent prophets of the world as 
it ought to be. We need poets and interpreters of 
Utopia, and ministers of the divine discontent. The 
mariners of old set a course by the stars for the 
distant islands of their dreams. In the hope of 
each voyager there was a sure, straight course to 
Cipango or Cathay. But the true course was not 
known until hardy adventurers had risked their 
lives in a thousand journeys across uncharted seas. 
The true courses never would have been found but 



6o THE NEW FRONTIER 

for the men who were wiUing to find out the truth 
at the risk of steering for the false, at the risk of 
finding at the end of a long and hazardous voyage, 
not the wealth of the Indies, but sandy wastes or 
limitless and unprofitable regions of snow and ice. 

The American pioneer pushed steadily toward the 
setting sun, impelled by his love of the great free 
spaces, and undaunted by the risks and dangers of 
his task. The American spirit was not born of an 
unwillingness to see changes wrought in the fabric 
of human relationships, when such changes seemed 
calculated to increase the happiness of the race. 
The spirit of the frontier is not conservative; and yet 
it is not the spirit of the malcontent and the agitator. 
It is the liberal impulse of free and vigorous men and 
women in whose minds there is an ordered purpose, 
calculated to produce a substantial measure of 
happiness. The hope of America lies in keeping 
this pioneer impulse fresh and active in the 
hearts of succeeding generations of men who are 
not to be adventurers across unknown oceans or un- 
explored continents but rather pioneers in the still 
uncharted regions of human relationships, organizers 
of the vast problems of the new frontier of pro- 
duction and distribution, and the government of 
organized society. 

We have always had liberals; but we have never 
had enough liberal leadership. Liberals have their 
place in many parties; they may be good Republicans 
or good Democrats, and sometimes good Socialists. 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 6i 

But they have too often failed of their greatest 
eflPectiveness because they have been too ready to 
assume a selfish attitude and avoid organized 
activity. They have too often been mere critics. 
They have seen the true course, but have been "too 
busy" to do anything about it. They have been the 
reserves rather than the shock troops. 

The Hberal citizens have more frequently been 
called upon as a unit when the issues before the 
public were non-partisan in character, or when 
partisan issues were carried to a point where the 
interest of the whole public was directly involved. 
Sometimes this uprising of liberal sentiment mani- 
fests itself in a municipal election and finds expres- 
sion in naming of a good government ticket. Today 
it is manifesting itself in the settlement of issues 
involving the existence of democratic institutions. 
The vote which reelected Governor Coolidge in 
Massachusetts in the fall of 1919 was not a con- 
servative vote. It was, to a large extent, liberal. 
Even the radicals were represented in this vote — 
those who think too well of America "with all its 
faults" to be wilHng to endorse a strike of a part of 
the people's government against the people whom it 
was the sworn duty of the strikers to protect. 

Meanwhile, because some radicals have been led 
to adopt measures which are violently subversive of 
government and consequently unpatriotic, there has 
been a tendency to assume that patriotism and con- 
servatism are synonymous. This is a dangerous point 



62 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of view, particularly when it leads the ultracon- 
servatives to wrap themselves in the folds of the 
flag and cry "no concessions to reform because all 
reform is tainted with a spirit un-American." A 
partnership between the stars and stripes and 
Bourbonism is no better than an alHance between 
the American flag and the red flag. Any successful 
attempt of reactionaries to identify themselves to 
the exclusion of others with principles of American- 
ism, can only be expected to fill with despair the 
Hberals whose love of America inspires them to 
bring about through votes the improvements in the 
condition of their fellow beings which they believe 
to be right and necessary — which they believe 
indeed to be the very essence of free, democratic 
institutions, and hence of American institutions. 

Here is where liberal leadership enters. It seeks 
to lead and mold pubHc opinion toward a fair 
middle course; to make clear that the average 
middle-of-the-road citizen is the one who suff"ers, 
if the extremists are allowed to occupy the field 
alone. 

The conviction of the liberal is not of the luke- 
warm variety. He believes as deeply and as vigor- 
ously in firm, ordered progress as the most ardent 
anarchist believes in blowing up statesmen. Though 
the liberal platform may be less brilliant and spec- 
tacular than the extremist platforms, it is destined 
to give relief to the body politic, the body social, 
to provide a breathing space between periods of hot 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 63 

pursuit of world-shaping panaceas, so that natural 
processes may work. The liberal is the family- 
doctor called in when the exhausted and feverish 
patient — the public — has sunk down in utter 
despair, feeling unsound in every organ; and the 
doctor recommends a rest, a less feverish pace, rather 
than a radical operation. In short, the liberal view 
is the view of the common every-day man, the man 
on the street, and the view of the labor leader and 
the corporation head who have retained their contact 
with simple living and clear thinking men and 
women. It is the point of view of the long suffering 
American public — rarely heard from as a whole, 
but just now giving signs of an impending self- 
assertion, forced upon it by a generation of buffetings 
and affronts. 

Another way to define the liberal is to outline 
his place among the other groups in the community. 
Who is who in America? President Mitchell of 
Delaware College declares that "we have today four 
parties: the party of the radical or the child; the 
party of the young man or the progressive; the party 
of the mature man or the conservative; and the 
party of the old man or the reactionary." This is 
suggestive; but common experience indicates that 
we have in America many old men, young at heart, 
who are essentially progressive, and many young 
men, old beyond their years, who, in fancy at least, 
are devotees of other and better days, young men 
more conservative than their fathers. It is not on 



64 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the basis of age entirely that public tendencies can 
be grouped. 

It may be a trifle more exact to take as a working 
basis these five groups: Syndicalists, or violent 
radicals, Socialists and other law-abiding radicals, 
liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries. The 
Syndicalist group includes in this country the 
I. W. W. They believe in what they call "direct 
action," namely, strikes and sabotage. "Sabotage 
consists in habitually loafing on the job, putting sand 
into the oil, putting sticks and pieces of metal into 
delicate machinery, destroying crops, misdirecting 
shipments of goods, annoying and irritating em- 
ployers in countless secret ways." For practical pur- 
poses we may place in this group the anarchists and 
*' Reds " whose methods of bringing about chaos differ 
slightly in detail but who have the common charac- 
teristic that they choose to live in America, and yet 
are wholly out of sympathy with every fundamental 
principle of the American nation. They do not 
hesitate at assault, arson, theft or murder, and they 
have no use for the popular vote unless they happen 
for the moment to control it. 

With the Socialists it is somewhat different. One 
of the best things that can be said for the Socialists 
is that the Syndicalists look upon them as con- 
servatives, if not as reactionaries. They are not 
believers in private property or individual initiative; 
but, while there is a wide range of doctrine that 
claims to be Socialist, fundamentally it should be 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 65 

borne in mind that these disciples of Karl Marx 
are generally content to bring about their purposes 
through the machinery of the popular vote, which is 
the most important fundamental of the American 
system. 

At the other end of the line, we have the extreme 
reactionary, who has ample money to pay his current 
bills, who is opposed to any change in his conditions 
of living or methods of doing business, who believes 
that everything that is, is right. He wants to main- 
tain the status quo in perpetuity. From the liberal 
standpoint, the reactionaries are decidedly less try- 
ing than the Syndicahsts in that they do not believe 
in violence. But their Americanism is distinctly 
pre-Revolutionary. Their behef in American in- 
stitutions involves so many qualifications, in the 
shape of an abhorrence of Congress, of the machinery 
and temper of democracy, of popular government in 
most of what they term its vulgar manifestations, 
that they are more akin to the intolerance and snob- 
bishness of the kaisers and czars of now discredited 
regimes than they are to the true spirit of the United 
States of America, 

As for the conservatives, one of the best things 
that can be said in their favor is that the reactionaries 
look upon them as radicals and demagogues. The 
conservatives as a group believe in American in- 
stitutions. They believe in strict recognition of 
traditions, both as to the spirit and the letter. But 
in the last analysis, when an issue is brought to vote 



66 THE NEW FRONTIER 

they abide by the decision with no small degree of 
good nature, and go about their business with an 
industry, and, withal, an inteUigence, which is of the 
greatest value in keeping the machinery of the 
RepubHc in motion, and protecting it from an undue 
variety of shocks and disturbances. 

Finally we have the Hberals. This group in 
America today is the largest of all. It includes most 
of the nation's workers, the keen, alert men and 
women in business and professional life, on the farms, 
in the newspaper offices, and in the factories, who 
provide a great part of the silent vote in our popular 
elections. Indeed it is the most representative and, 
on the whole, while varying from time to time 
according to the temper of the day and the particular 
issues involved, potentially the strongest and most 
national element in the country. 

These groups make up the great human pageant 
which is America. The line between them cannot 
be drawn with exactness; but the main elements of 
the groups are not hard to recognize. If we leave 
out of consideration for the present, as so limited in 
numbers and lacking in popular sympathy as to be 
comparatively unimportant, both the Syndicalist 
group and the reactionary group, we have left a 
fairly clear definition of our three chief forces. We 
have on the one hand a group of Sociahsts and other 
radicals who are in sympathetic alliance with the 
Socialists, who beheve that speedy and far-reaching 
changes in our social and political system should be 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 67 

brought about; and at the other extreme we have a 
group which is, perhaps, too contented with the 
present industrial, social and pohtical situation. 
Between these two, quite distinct in the mass, but 
blending at either end of the line with the more 
extreme groups, we have the liberals. They are 
today the real hope of the nation. As we move in 
great diagonals, first toward the left and then toward 
the right, as the subtle and indefinable forces of 
action and reaction sway the popular tendencies 
toward the conservative or toward the radical point 
of view, it is the function of the Hberals to prevent 
these swings from attaining too great momentum 
and driving us too far from the sane middle-of-the- 
road policies which alone in the long run can be 
national, as contrasted with group, policies. 

The liberal seeks the sohd and eternal middle- 
ground, perhaps less alluring than the by-ways, but 
visible through the ages as the highway of the actual 
forward movement of the race. No man or woman 
can be called liberal today who lacks a deep sense of 
the necessity for adjustments and even substantial 
changes in the relationships of men and things. 
But where the radical simply wants to go, the liberal 
wants to go somezvhere. When a half-considered 
measure of reform is proposed, the radical shouts, 
"Now," the conservative retorts, "Never," while 
the hberal may simply say, **Not yet." 

The liberal finds himself opposed to any plan 
calculated abruptly to alter American institutions. 



68 THE NEW FRONTIER 

He realizes they are doubtless imperfect, being of 
human construction; but he knows they were not 
set up in a day and should not be torn down in a 
day. They are the result of an evolution, and were 
gradually shaped by the dreams and errors and in- 
spiration and sweat of whole generations of men and 
women, in times of stability, and also during periods 
quite as saturated with unrest as our own. The 
liberal seeks, therefore, to prevent extremists from 
fooling the public with the magic falsehood which 
has undermined the stamina and common sense of 
all people who have let themselves believe in it, 
the age-old cry of the necromancer, the alchemist, 
the swindler and the radical agitator: "Here is 
something for nothing!" 

The liberals are not a class. Their greatest 
mission is to merge class distinction into American- 
ism. But the varying degree of speed in national 
progress produced by the conflict of vigorous op- 
posing groups is the excuse for the very existence of a 
working platform of liberalism. It would be a dull 
and stagnant world without extremists to stimulate 
the circulation of ideas. The friendly war of wits 
and enthusiasts has done more for progress, year in 
and year out, than all the staid logic of the schools. 
The heat of conflict, with its bitter war-cries and 
stinging give-and-take, and its ever present sense 
of humor, has never hurt America. It flourished 
in the ardent days of the Revolution. It was a 
saving grace in the Old West. Because it is char- 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 69 

acteristic of the genius of our people, we must take 
care not to curb it too tightly. Men of command- 
ing personality, with the native vigor of the sons of 
pioneers, have often led us into tangled by-ways of 
political and economic absurdity. But we have 
followed, and we shall always follow; because men 
and women, even the highly trained, will always 
have a fundamental craving for vigorous leadership, 
even though it be blind leadership. And of late, 
we have been led to our hearts' content, groups of 
us this way and that, swept off our feet by propo- 
nents of economic cure-alls and industrial Utopias. 

It is only when this hot but ordinarily friendly 
action and reaction becomes clouded with mutual 
suspicion and hatred; when it involves deep- 
seated distrust by one group of Americans of other 
groups of Americans; when it threatens the welfare 
and happiness and even the lives of our people, 
that it ceases to be tolerable. Then we need to 
call a halt and ask ourselves, not as groups or parties, 
but as Americans: Whither are we headed? 

In approaching the industrial problem, for ex- 
ample, it falls to the liberals, who are free to think 
without being influenced by the preconceptions of 
extremists, to express the belief that Americans are 
too vigorous a race to rest upon the laurels of past 
achievement, too farsighted to assume that the 
soundness of every American institution is self- 
evident, and that all proposed changes are sacrilege. 
That is not the spirit that built America. That is 



70 THE NEW FRONTIER 

not the spirit in which we may profitably approach 
the problem of social unrest which has to an un- 
precedented degree for more than a year filled the 
columns of our newspapers, and stirred the deepest 
feeUngs of our people. Possibly in a situation of 
this sort the liberal method of approach is the only 
road to sanity and ultimate solution. 

First of all, it is important to distinguish be- 
tween industrial unrest and revolutionary agitation 
tending toward the over-throw of government. 
There is no inherent difference between the anarchist 
who brings his direct action to bear upon the object 
of his hate through bomb-throwing, and the an- 
archist who works less directly through the processes 
of industrial agitation. But this fact does not 
necessarily render identical Red radicalism and even 
the excessive demands of patriotic labor. The exist- 
ence of industrial conditions which need correction 
make the labor field a fertile one for the activi- 
ties of the American Bolsheviki. The confusion 
of industrial agitation with efforts tending to over- 
throw our Government and institutions has long 
been a source of great strength to the Reds and a 
great source of weakness to labor. The misrepre- 
sentations with regard to the needs and desires of 
labor which have been made current by agitators 
who have no constructive interest in labor condi- 
tions has been a powerful generator of ill-feeling and 
misunderstanding in all branches of the industrial 
world. The liberal does not believe that a more 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 71 

loyal group exists than the rank and file of American 
labor. The average laboring man is far more 
scornful of the Red than the average lawyer or 
doctor because he has come into contact with the 
Red and has had an opportunity to appraise him. 
None the less, the perpetual agitators exist, and do 
great harm. 

What we need, and what we can get with patience 
and insight, is an attitude of fair play both toward 
labor and toward the radical agitator. This last 
mentioned group is found in every age and in every 
land. Their disease may be called criminal im- 
patience. They are children who seek to get what 
they want by snatching it. In them the animal 
instinct to kill and tear down is predominant. 
And when they work upon the passions of men who 
have a grievance they naturally bring about an at- 
titude of mind which is more extreme than their 
average humble follower realizes in the heat of a 
strike or a riot. Under our Constitution and laws 
we cannot prevent these persons, in time of peace, 
from giving expression to their views. In these 
days we are still unconsciously influenced by the 
highly militant spirit developed during the war, 
but we cannot afford to forget that a war must be 
waged, even by a democracy, under a system of 
temporary autocracy. When the war has been 
won we cannot too soon remind ourselves that our 
own forefathers who landed at Plymouth and Boston 
sought out those wild shores across an almost un- 



72 THE NEW FRONTIER 

known ocean largely because their views were un- 
acceptable and their language intolerable to the 
leaders of public opinion in the land from which 
they came. 

In a recent case in the United States Supreme 
Court, Justice Holmes, in a dissenting opinion called 
attention to this foundation stone of American 
liberty. He said: 

"We should be eternally vigilant against attempts 
to check the expression of opinions that we loathe 
and believe to be fraught with death, unless they 
so imminently threaten interference with the lawful 
and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate 
check is required to save the country. 

"Only the emergency that makes it immediately 
dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsel 
to time, warrants making any exception to the 
sweeping demand: * Congress shall make no law 
abridging the freedom of speech.'" ' 

When overt acts are committed against the 
Government or its citizens there should be a more 
swift and sure retribution than anything yet de- 
veloped by any national or city administration. 
Where proof of law-breaking is conclusive there 
should be less talk of action and more action. There 
is no qualification possible to this necessity. There 
is no possible compromise between the intrenched 
position of Americanism and the militant activities 
of Syndicalists, anarchists and revolutionists. The 
American Legion and good citizenship generally 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 73 

cannot do too much to rid the nation of these sub- 
limated murderers. This is a Hberal policy also. 
The Hberal is not opposed to vigorous action, but 
he believes that such action should come only when 
it is positively and clearly justified, and then it 
should be taken with promptness and unqualified 
determination. The liberal does not even maintain 
that revolution is never justifiable. But he be- 
lieves it should not be lightly entered upon. His 
views are fully expressed in the language of the 
Declaration of Independence: 

"When in the course of human events, it becomes 
necessary for one people to dissolve the political 
bands which have connected them with another, 
... a decent respect to the opinions of mankind 
requires that they should declare the causes which 
impel them to the separation. . . . Prudence will 
dictate that governments long established should 
not be changed for light and transient causes. . . . 
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, 
pursuing invariably the same object evinces a de- 
sign to reduce them under absolute despotism, it 
is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such 
government, and to provide new guards for their 
future security." 

These are carefully chosen words. Should similar 
conditions of oppression arise a similar remedy is 
always at hand. But it behooves those who resort 
to this remedy to be sure of the desperate character 
of their state of oppression, and to realize that acts 



74 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of treason and rebellion become acts of revolution 
only after they have succeeded. 
■ In these matters infinite patience is required to 
apply the rule of justice. There is no question in 
America today on which fair-minded men so fre- 
quently differ as the question of just where the 
line is to be drawn between the right of free speech 
and the abuse of that right. However, the Hberal 
maintains that the right itself is such a sacred and 
vital element in the system of liberty and democracy, 
that it must be maintained even when it is bitterly 
unpleasant to do so. It must be clear that an 
autocracy of opinion is not conceivable in America. 
Except in the emergency of war we cannot maintain 
that ideas unpopular to the majority are verhoten. 

Arthur Woods, in his valuable book, "The PoHce- 
man and the Public," cites an instance of a liberal 
method of handling an agitator. 

"On the day in question a good-sized crowd was 
being exorted by an earnest young woman. The 
day was warm, the sun was shining, one of these 
grateful first days of spring which so gladden our 
hearts after a persistent, dreary winter. The sky 
was blue, the breeze gentle. The men in the crowd 
were contented and good-natured. They had fin- 
ished their lunch and were listening rather curiously 
and tolerantly to the orator, most of them placidly 
smoking. She was declaring that about everything 
connected with government was wrojig; that rulers 
were slaves of capitalists; that workers were slaves 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 75 

of rulers; that the whole situation was intolerable 
and should not be permitted; that, in fact, most 
everything was wrong, and the only real way to 
right it was to listen to her, — she would point out 
the way, then the people could rise in their might, 
smite their rulers, and run things. The crowd kept 
on calmly puffing at cigars and complacently en- 
joying the comfortable after-lunch feeling and the 
auspicious spring noon. 

"A newcomer walking down Broadway joined 
the crowd. Possibly he had had no lunch, or too 
much, for he seemed to take seriously the words of 
the speaker which were making no impression upon 
the others. He blurted out in a loud voice that if she 
didn't stop saying things like that he would make 
her! She answered tartly, for that was just the 
opportunity she wanted, a chance to start things, 
— she hadn't been able to work the crowd up at all 
until now. The man was irritated by her reply, 
made a movement toward her, and announced that 
he would show her 'what was what.' 

"At once the atmosphere changed. Men straight- 
ened up, took their hands out of their pockets, 
puffed cigars faster. Faces began to tighten. 
People moved in closer. The complacency of a few 
moments before had gone. Tenseness was re- 
placing it. 

"The policeman assigned to cover that meeting 
was standing on one side of the crowd; he too had 
been enjoying the weather and the warmth. He 



76 THE NEW FRONTIER 

was comfortably braced on legs spread apart at 
exactly the angle which would give him the best 
support and call for the least effort, swinging his 
night stick idly back and forth and giving no heed 
to the meeting, for, as an individual, he was not in- 
terested in the doctrine that was being expounded, 
and, as an officer of the law, nothing was happening 
which demanded his attention. With the change 
created by the coming of the outraged citizen, 
however, a new condition developed. 

"Stepping up to the objector the officer touched 
him on the shoulder and said pleasantly, 'Come, my 
friend, you'll have to cut this out/ 

"'Cut nothing out! Do you hear what she's 
saying, officer.? Why don't you stop her.f* If 
you don't, I will!' 

'"Now see here,' the policeman soothingly an- 
swered, 'this here is her show. She isn't violating 
any law and as long as she don't I'm going to pro- 
tect her in her meeting. If you want to hold a 
meeting, go over to the other side of the street there 
and I'll protect you too.' 

"This closed the incident. The objector walked 
off, the group of listeners went their several ways, 
smiling and amused, and the orator disappeared." 

This chapter may serve to define in a preliminary 
way what a liberal Is. What the liberals seek is that 
a standard may be set up which will be the rallying 
point, not of men who are seeking to win a victory 
of might, but a standard on which are blazoned th^ 



WHAT IS A LIBERAL? 77 

words of Lincoln: "Right is might," a standard 
consecrated to the preservation of those few simple 
rugged principles which are woven into the brawn 
and spirit of America, a standard borne aloft by 
idealists who have actually attained the practical. 



THE POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF 
THE ROAD 

In the words of a recent writer, "The pecuHar 
mental disease of the time is a vague desire to make 
the world better combined with absolute ignorance 
of how this is to be done." 

In the previous chapters an effort has been made 
to define the practical idealism of the frontier with a 
long tradition of definite accompHshment behind it, 
as a vital element in Americanism, and to interpret 
it for present-day purposes in the form of a con- 
sciously liberal attitude and method of approach. 
It is the main thesis of this book. If it were fully 
understood, there would be no object in further dis- 
cussion in these pages. But at the risk of over- 
emphasis it seems proper to avoid the danger of 
leaving this thought in the realms of the ideal, and 
thus neglecting one half of its force. We must 
make an effort to apply liberal principles to some 
modern American problems, not with an idea of 
offering a solution of the problems themselves, 
but by way of illustrating in some small measure 
the greater possibilities of these principles when 
applied over the whole range of the American Hfe 
of today. 

78 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 79 

Let us take for example the liberal in his relation- 
ship to politics. He is a balance-wheel. The 
radical is dangerous only when the hberal is quies- 
cent. The conservative tends towards reaction only 
when the liberal is inactive. In our own day the 
extremes in politics have drawn too far apart. 
Their differences sometimes appear irreconcilable. 
But In America some working basis is always found; 
and to find It Is always the paramount duty of the 
liberal. This Is particularly true In the world of 
Industry. The political Hberal can render a supreme 
service in speeding up the machinery of constructive 
reform so that the opposing industrial elements will 
cease the perpetual shaking of fists In one another's 
faces, and get down to the business of analysis and 
comparison of facts. There Is too much talk of 
war between capital and labor. In the first place 
there can be no real fight if a few men who have 
succeeded In a financial way are supposed to be 
defending a system of personal privilege against 
millions of men and women In moderate circum- 
stances. The fight Is ended before It Is begun. 
Under a form of government where votes prevail, 
a system of capitalism which could be shown to be 
simply a system of unmerited personal privilege 
and recompense would not have chance enough 
to make the struggle even Interesting. If labor 
will realize the power of the ballot and Its Infinite 
superiority to the strike as a medium of attaining 
lasting results, labor will not be bo ready to conclude 



8o THE NEW FRONTIER 

that the vote is too slow. If the radicals can win 
victories at the polls they will win lasting and 
American victories. 

Of course the radicals have an answer to this. 
Mr. Morris Hillquit in the fifth edition of his History 
of Socialism in the United States says, in speaking 
of the difficulties in the path of the rapid growth 
of socialism: "Another obstacle has been the 
political system of the country. Paradoxical as it 
may seem, our very democracy has militated against 
the immediate success of socialism. . . . Politics has 
become as much an industry with us as railroading 
or manufacturing. This situation has bred in the 
mind of the average American, including the Ameri- 
can workingman, a deep-seated feeling of indifference, 
even contempt, for politics, which is anything but 
conducive to the development of a radical move- 
ment for political reform." 

In other words, as a believer in democracy might 
put it, the Socialists have failed to convince a suf- 
ficient number of American voters of the rightness 
of their cause or the desirability of their candidates 
to enable them to succeed largely in the political 
arena. Therefore they will no longer play the game. 
They will invent a new game with rules of their 
own, and be their own judge and jury. . ' r^ 
i Mr. Hillquit continues: "The difficulties of all 
such reform movements are still more aggravated 
by the so-called 'two party' system in American 
politics. Ever since the creation of the republic 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 8i 

the contest for political power has been waged be- 
tween two, and only two, dominant parties. New 
political parties, so-called 'third parties,' have ap- 
peared in the arena from time to time but not one 
of them has developed any appreciable strength 
and stabihty. As a rule they have, after a more or 
less tempestuous career, been absorbed by one of 
the old parties. The two party system thus sanc- 
tioned by tradition, is now largely continued by 
design. The dominant political parties, the Re- 
publican and Democratic, are in the nature of 
political trusts. Together they control all the 
offices and 'patronage' of the country and almost 
the entire press and other organs of public expres- 
sion. They have the backing of the great industrial 
and financial interests and the support of large 
armies of trained and speciaHzed political workers. 
They divide all political 'spoils' among themselves, 
mostly by methods of struggle and conquest, and 
sometimes by voluntary apportionment. The task 
of a new party to replace either of them or to gain 
a permanent or important footing alongside of 
them is thus from the outset a very difficult one." 

The net result of all this is that it is a difficult 
job to get a new system of thought or a new social 
order adopted in America. Is that a fault in our 
system? Or is the fault with the Socialist proposal.? 
Have they not enough devotion and enthusiasm, 
coupled with necessary knowledge of organization 
and publicity methods, to play the game in America 



82 THE NEW FRONTIER 

with American tools? Has any party a vested right 
to a place in the sun except upon a basis of con- 
vincing the minds as well as touching the hearts of 
our people? The trouble is that the Socialists, 
like all other human beings, are impatient for re- 
sults. It never occurs to them that perhaps the 
verdict so far pronounced by the majority of Ameri- 
cans may be right. Socialism may not be right for 
America. It certainly is not an American policy 
until American voters vote for it. 

Mr. Hillquit himself adopts a more patient at- 
titude toward the present political machinery when, 
at the close of his well-written, and, to a liberal 
wholly unconvincing, book he says, "Many of the 
measures of industrial,''social and political reform, 
originally advocated exclusively by the Socialists, 
are gradually being forced into the platforms of 
other parties and organizations. The Socialist 
program has become one of the favorite topics of 
discussion in books, in the periodical press, and on 
our public platforms. Socialism is at last beginning 
to get a hearing before the people, and the people 
of the United States move fast when once they are 
set in motion." 

: This passage answers the charge of Mr. Hillquit 
made in the previous quotation. He admits he is 
getting a hearing. Despite occasional hysterical in- 
stances of un-American repression, in Albany and 
elsewhere, the Socialist who is loyal to America will 
always have the right to be heard. He can ask 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 83 

for no more. If his cause is right it will prevail. 
But if it is wrong, we shall hope that liberal lead- 
ership, following the immemorial custom of Ameri- 
can politics, will absorb into one or the other of the 
great parties from year to year, all that is good of it, 
or all that the people are ready for. This is what 
was done by the Democrats and to some extent by 
the Republicans with the doctrines of the Pro- 
gressive Party. It was done by Jefferson with much 
of the best doctrine of the Federalists, so that there 
was nothing for that party to do but go out of busi- 
ness. It has always been one of the most magni- 
ficent safeguards of American liberalism and orderly 
democracy to absorb little by little the good in 
all the new and radical groups that have been 
springing up among us. It keeps us in the middle of 
the road, going forward always, perhaps not as fast 
as we should, but certainly not turning turtle in road- 
side ditches because we are off the road, or speeding. 
As for the radicals we must face the fact that they 
are working to win. They cannot be ignored; and 
they can only be met by organization and full partici- 
pation in politics by the liberal element in the com- 
munity. The following brief and pertinent edi- 
torial recently appeared in a New York newspaper: 

REGISTRATION 

Registration began yesterday and will continue the 
remaining days of the week. If you believe there is 
a better way of conducting government than by riot 
and force see that your name is on the voting list. 



84 THE NEW FRONTIER 

The citizens of New York took the advice offered. 
A great many were busy men and women who 
ordinarily belong to what is known as the "silent 
vote" — the group which appears at the polls only 
to register a conviction. The vote means something 
to these people. They reahze that the people often 
vote for bad measures. But they have an enduring 
and fundamental faith that in the long run the people 
vote right — that the vote is indeed the only pos- 
sible machinery for a sane middle-of-the-road democ- 
racy to employ. They believe it is the answer 
of the ages to the two extremes of mob rule and 
Kaiser rule. 

This middle-of-the-road democracy is worth a 
little study. It is a very good thing to tie to in 
times like our own. In one sense it is a policy of 
compromise. Sometimes it is hard for some of our 
leaders to get into their minds the distinction be- 
tween compromising on principle and compromis- 
ing on everything else in the world except principle. 
Parson Campbell said to young David Balfour when 
he was starting out on his journey of life, "Be 
soople, Davie, in things immaterial!" This is 
traditional American doctrine. The only danger in- 
volved in it is that in this country where freedtTm of 
thought has led us to give full credit to every man's 
point of view, people are too ready to believe there 
are two sides to every question, in the sense of two 
right sides. This is not liberalism but intellectual 
nihilism. It leads men to assume that the truth 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 85 

cannot be arrived at, that a working basis is im- 
possible to attain. In trying to avoid dogmatism 
and an intolerant or a reactionary point of view we 
have given too much consideration to utterances in 
which the precentage of truth was so small as to 
be negligible. 

H. G. Wells is quoted as having said at the end of 
a long argument with a group of men in a London 
club, lasting until four or five o'clock in the morning, 
that he was through with arguments. He always 
found, he said, that after all present had argued 
until they were tired out it almost always appeared 
that the difficulty was simple and fundamental, 
one that could have been settled in ten minutes, 
and involved a failure to define the terms which 
were the basis of the discussion and which each 
man was using in an entirely different significance. 

One of the tasks of liberal leadership today is to 
arrive at a definition of terms, the common plat- 
form of principle and understanding. After this 
common basis of discussion has been arrived at it 
will very often appear quite clearly, not that both 
sides to the controversy are right, but that both 
sides are intelligible. Then for the liberal leader 
who is looking to acquire not simply a philosophical 
understanding of life, and a human sympathy with 
the tendencies in human nature toward extremes of 
radicalism or conservatism, but also a course of 
action for today and tomorrow, the true solution 
will often seem to lie in a middle course. "We 



86 THE NEW FRONTIER 

have achieved democracy in politics," said Theodore 
Roosevelt, "just because we have been able to 
steer a middle course between the rule of the mob 
and the rule of the dictator. We shall achieve in- 
dustrial democracy because we shall steer a similar 
middle course between the extreme individualist 
and the socialist, between the demagogue who at- 
tacks all wealth and who can see no wrong done 
anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of 
wealth, and the apologist for the plutocracy who 
rails against so much as a re-statement of the 
Eighth Commandment upon the ground that it 
will 'hurt business.'" 

In his study of the Civil War, James K. Hosmer 
says of Lincoln, "The Democrats and border-state 
men blocked abolition measures as they could, 
while the Republicans pushed them ever more 
energetically. Between the two opinions Lincoln 
sought a middle course." The lessons of accom- 
plishment and of liberal progress for the people of 
this nation, embodied in the lives of Lincoln and 
Roosevelt, are worth study by men who are too 
ready to believe that conviction on a particular 
point immediately calls for them to take a high 
moral stand and declare with great emphasis: 
**This issue involves a principle," "On this subject 
there can be no compromise"; "There is nothing to 
arbitrate." t 

There come times in the lives of men when ar- 
bitration must end, when no further compromise is 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 87 

possible. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt faced such 
crises with firmness and high courage. But liberals 
of today will do well to realize that the occasions 
are few when compromise can be impossible, if un- 
willingness to compromise must lead to bloodshed 
and disaster, and may in the end not bring about 
the results accomplished. There have been few 
men in this world who could afford to be sufficiently 
sure of themselves, sufficiently confident of their 
individual judgment and insight in dealing with 
issues involving the happiness of great bodies of men 
and women, to be able to take the position that there 
is nothing to arbitrate. The great forward steps in 
the history of the world have been taken by men who 
combined a burning conviction of the tightness of 
their cause with the profound practical ability to 
get that cause one step farther toward its realiza- 
tion this year, and another step forward next year 
and another step forward the year after, firmly 
establishing each forward step on the basis of public 
opinion. In great leaders patience has not been 
inconsistent with enthusiasm. This is progress in 
the middle of the road. This is the vigorous but 
steady and permanent progress of the pioneer with 
his eyes definitely turned Westward. It is not the 
progress of Danton and Robespierre with their eyes 
turned inward, sweeping a nation in one step from 
the extreme of autocracy to the extreme of moboc- 
racy, only to see it swing sharply back to an au- 
tocracy more extreme than the one destroyed. 



88 THE NEW FRONTIER 

Liberalism is a point of view and not a body of 
doctrine. It is the common law of thought and not 
a formal statute. The true Hberal approaches his 
problems one at a time; he espouses a cause only 
after he has thought it through. But when he has 
reached this point he will with enthusiasm fight 
the battle to the end. Great causes are never led 
by intellectuals. When the lines are once laid, 
then the leader must put his analytical powers in 
the background and nail his flag to the mast. "It 
is only on the wings of enthusiasm that we rise, 
and he who depends upon reason alone will never 
fly." This is the human element in the discussion 
of leadership which makes it so dramatically in- 
teresting. The liberal leader may espouse a cause 
and become so carried away with it as to go to all 
the extremes which his common sense makes him 
feel are unjustified. In the heat of battle he throws 
overboard his Hberalism and becomes a radical; or 
his success may dull the edge of his determination 
and he may swing to the reactionary side. 

In the middle of the sixteenth century occurred 
one of the great upheavals of history brought about 
by a group of men who insisted on thinking for 
themselves. The Reformation shaped itself from 
small beginnings into a great forward step in human 
thought and in the relations between man and man, 
and between man and the Church. But "The new 
communions soon proved themselves scarcely more 
tolerant that the old. Asserting their own claims 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 89 

to liberty of opinion, they were quick to refuse 
that privilege to those who disagreed with them. 
It was still possible for Luther to deny the suprem- 
acy of Roman dogma and to denounce the doctrines 
of his protestant rivals with equal vigor. It was 
still possible for Calvin to demonstrate his right to 
renounce the old faith and practices, and have 
Servetus burned for refusing to assent to a particular 
arrangement of the words, 'the infinite Son of the 
Father* as against 'the Son of the infinite Father.'" 
An ever fresh supply of liberal leaders is needed, 
the administrators of the world, to raise standards 
of action for a new day and generation. And one 
of the most useful objects of consideration is always 
our National Legislature. The present Congress is 
made up of three hundred and twenty-three men, 
out of a total membership of five hundred and 
twenty-nine, who may roughly be classified as 
lawyers. Fifty-six are business men or manu- 
facturers, nineteen are bankers. 



Table of Occupational Classification of Members of 
Congress 

Senate House Total 

Lawyers 6i 262 323 

Business men 1 , 

Manufacturers J 

Lawyer, author and college ] 
president I 

Lawyer and farmer f 

Lawyer and business man j 

Bankers S 14 19 



90 - THE NEW FRONTIER 

Senate House Total 

Newspaper men and publishers 8 25 33 

Farmers 6 9 15 

Teachers 6 6 

Doctors 2 3 5 

Ministers and professors 2 2 

Author and lecturer I I 

Dentist i i 

Builders 2 2 

Mining men 2 2 

Locomotive engineers 3 3 

Iron molders 2 2 

Hat worker I I 

Railroad conductors' representative 1 i 

No occupation given 6 42 48 

95 434 529 



It is obvious that if we are going to have a 
thoroughly representative Congress we need to 
spread out our leadership more widely. We need 
more trained business men and engineers. It is 
true that the salary of $7500 now paid to a repre- 
sentative or senator is the sole cause of keeping out 
of Congress many men whom we should like to have 
there. Perhaps the compensation should be higher, 
although in comparison with the $12,000 salaries 
of cabinet officers, for example, it is not strik- 
ingly low. But what is needed more than an 
increase of salary is the increase in popular under- 
standing of the significance of Congress so that its 
prestige may grow and thus strengthen the impulse 
on the part of the best men in the country to render 
service in Washington. Money alone will not lead 
them there. 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 91 

Liberal thought has almost as much to do in 
bringing about a fairer attitude toward Congress 
as it has in bringing about a more thorough under- 
standing of business. There are probably in the 
country almost as many people who have fallen 
into the practice of criticizing Congress as there 
are people who attribute all our woes to the busi- 
ness and financial district of lower Manhattan. 
In bringing about a closer cooperation among 
leaders of thought, business men must get over 
criticizing Congress in the abstract just as Congress 
must get over attacking Wall Street in the ab- 
stract. Individuals in both groups will always be 
helped by just criticism; but both are a product of 
a complex variety of conditions, and as each system 
requires it, we should unite in modifying it, rather 
than keeping up the present tiresome and de- 
structive mutual recrimination. This suggestion 
may sound impossible, but it is important enough 
to merit consideration. • ,; . 

A discussion of Congress goes to the root of our 
institutions. We have a representative govern- 
ment, and Congress comes as near being a fully 
representative body as any In the world. The 
American system did not contemplate a Congress 
made up of the most distinguished, experienced and 
cultured men in the nation. That would be not 
a Senate and Llouse ^of Representatives, but a 
kind of Hall of Fame. The country could not 
afford to have all its active and trusted leaders 



92 THE NEW FRONTIER 

spending most of their time in Washington. What 
we have in Congress is a representative group, 
typical of the trained and thoughtful men of America 
and of the untrained and thoughtless, the idealists 
and the demagogues, the selfish and the generous, 
the practical and the impractical, the men of dy- 
namic energy and the loafers. Sometimes we find a 
representative who is below the standard of the rep- 
resentative thought of his constituency, and then 
we may say that he represents simply the low 
degree of awakened responsibility which exists in 
his district. 

This is a most vital point. If the voters are 
asleep they cannot expect the best man in the 
district to take pride and pleasure in representing 
them in Congress at ^7500 a year. Then again, 
we have many districts in this country where the 
constituency comprises nothing but farmers, vigor- 
ously engaged in producing foodstuffs for America 
and for the world. It is not in their line to de- 
velop trained economists or experts in international 
law or forensic debate. But they can send to Con- 
gress a man who'is a straightforward and rugged type 
of American citizenship and who can throw a great 
light upon agricultural necessities. Big Tim Sul- 
livan, of New York, was quoted as saying that he 
could represent his East Side constituency in Con- 
gress a great deal better than Alexander Hamilton 
could have represented it. And he was right. 
Assuming that a district has fallen under the control 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 93 

of machine politics to an extent where the votes 
of the people are used for personal rather than 
pubHc purposes, the remedy lies in raising the 
standard of political morality in that district and 
not in complaining of the quality of the repre- 
sentative who adequately represents the state of 
political education of the people whose votes elect 
him. If we believe in a representative system we 
should stop complaining of the way the system is 
working and take steps to see that it works better 
by discharging our duties as citizens, not only in 
times of political enthusiasm, but every time a 
primary or other election takes place. There are 
many who argue with considerable logic that a 
man or woman ought to retain the right of citizen- 
ship just so long as the right of suffrage is exercised, 
and that to help matters along a fine should be im- 
posed upon those who do not vote. 

It has been said of American business men as a 
whole, that their famous American originality and 
ability is shown in almost every direction except 
politics, and is weakest of all when it comes to local 
poHtics, which must be sound before national 
politics can be expected to be sound. The influence 
of Theodore Roosevelt did more than any other one 
thing towards cleaning out the extreme corruptions 
of the city governments of a generation ago. But 
even today there is much to be done. In all our 
big cities the liberal element occasionally arouses 
itself to a sense of responsibility and puts in a so- 



94 THE NEW FRONTIER 

called reform administration, the temporary suc- 
cess of which is almost always the signal for two 
things: first, the retirement of the liberal element 
who have aroused themselves for one great cam- 
paign and who, feeling that a splendid result has 
been accomplished, go about their several lines of 
business; and second, the redoubled activity of 
the organization which is voted out of power. A 
host of professional politicians find themselves 
out of a job and set to work quietly and effectively 
night and day to such good effect that the next 
election is usually an overwhelming victory for their 
forces. 

The amount of work necessary for a group of 
liberal amateurs to turn out of office a group of 
intrenched professional politicians is out of all 
proportion to what can be expected over a period 
of years from men who are busy in other matters. 
The answer is that the liberal element in every 
community must organize and maintain a per- 
manent active organization of opposition, based 
upon principle and not upon prejudice. More men 
of education and private income should be willing 
to go into politics, as Theodore Roosevelt did, at 
the bottom, and become professionals in the best 
sense of the word, so as to lead the amateurs along 
right lines. There is nothing more pitiful as a 
rule than the misguided intentions of a group of 
otherwise intelligent and successful business men 
who get together over night and determine to win 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 95 

an election. LTnless there is a dominating cause 
which sweeps the people off their feet such a group 
almost always finds itself helpless in the face of 
the opposition of the members of the "machine" 
who are professional students of popular psychology 
and who can turn almost anything the business 
man may say to their sharp disadvantage as being 
inspired by the "silk-stockings" and backed by 
the "money-bags." 

The only way to fight a political machine is with 
another political machine which knows just as 
much about popular psychology and just as much 
about the legitimate methods of political campaign- 
ing, but which is dominated by motives of public 
spirit rather than motives of private advantage. 
In this work leadership is necessary. What is 
everybody's job is nobody's job in politics. We 
must have leaders of practical experience whose 
principles and ideals have been tested by a close 
and life-long contact with practical politics. Let 
them go into the hurly-burly of politics, with its 
old rules and traditions, its impulsiveness, its good 
humor. Let them submit their personality and 
their ideals to the judgment of the voters, and they 
will find that judgment generally sound. 

While we are discussing the character of our 
public men it is relevant to refer to the interesting 
fact that a new influence has been injected into 
national politics with the advent of the woman 
voter. As yet the woman in national politics in 



96 THE NEW FRONTIER 

America has no history. How she gained ad- 
mittance to the poHtical arena is a stirring story. 
But it takes a long time in the give and take of 
primaries and elections for any new and far-reach- 
ing movement to develop a set of chronicles upon 
which sound judgment can be passed and from 
which principles can be drawn. That women are 
in politics with a determination to make history is 
evident. One of the significant stories in the recent 
political news is the following from a New York 
paper, which is given in full with a change of 
names. z » > 

"Republican women of Plumville believed John 
J. Nowitz had called them cats and old hens and 
was against giving them an opportunity of voice in 
the party management, and he was deposed as 
chairman of the Plumville County Committee last 
night. The members of the county committee 
elected John W. Gallahad. Chairman Gallahad is 
head of a local charitable organization. He has 
heretofore played no part in politics. The women 
did not stop with forcing out Nowitz, however. 
They insisted upon an entirely new staff of officers, 
which was promptly named. Then they demanded 
that a woman be selected as co-chairman. Under 
the rules this could only be done at a special meet- 
ing. A special meeting was called." 

The women of Plumville have felt a taste of power, 
and they will pass the good word along. The en- 
trance of women into politics thus brings us one step 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 97 

nearer to an unqualified acceptance of the first 
seven words of the Preamble of the Constitution of 
the United States, which reads, "We, the people 
of the United States, in order to form a more perfect 
union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquilHty, 
provide for the common defense, promote the gen- 
eral welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to 
ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish 
this Constitution for the United States of America." 
When these words were written "We, the people" 
did our ordaining entirely through the mascuHne 
half of the population. 

The war taught us that women can handle great 
organizations efficiently and constructively. The 
few who still maintained in 1916 that the world 
was standing on its head because women were al- 
lowed to vote are rarely heard from, since women 
demonstrated their power and ability as organizers 
and persistent workers in France, in the Liberty 
Loans and in a hundred branches of war relief. 
But even here it should be emphasized that possibly 
the most conspicuous cases of achievement on the 
part of women during the war were those where 
they entered without prejudice or favor into great 
organizations with men, working shoulder to shoulder 
with men, and achieving their success, not because 
they were women, nor in spite of the fact they were 
women, nor indeed as women at all, but simply as 
straightforward and conspicuous examples of Ameri- 
can character, energy and business efficiency. 



98 THE NEW FRONTIER 

The opportunity which Hes ahead of women is a 
brilHant one. In a land of pioneer traditions, 
they have the stirring opportunity of becoming 
pioneers in a thousand fields, of proving worthy 
daughters of those women who made possible the 
winning of the West, to whom Emerson Hough has 
paid this striking tribute: "The chief figure of the 
American West, the figure of the ages; is not the 
long-haired, fringed-legginged man, riding a raw- 
boned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced woman, 
following her lord where he might lead, her face 
hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had 
crossed the Appalachians and the Missouri long 
before. That was America, my brethren! There 
was the seat of America's wealth. There was the 
great romance of all America — the woman and 
the sunbonnet, and not, after all, the hero with 
the rifle across his saddle-horn," 

From the standpoint of the present discussion 
women are of vital importance to the America of 
the future because the majority of women are 
liberals. Many of them are conservatives, but 
comparatively few are sincerely and thoughtfully 
revolutionary. By nature they desire to achieve 
their ends by orderly methods. They believe in 
American traditions and American ways of getting 
results. We need the cooperation of liberal women. 
It will raise the standards of business and public 
life and give to both new character and soundness. 

It is perhaps more vital than many people realize 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 99 

that enlightened men and women should go into 
pohtics. What is our situation today? What do 
our political parties stand for? Do we realize how 
necessary it is to the proper functioning of proper 
government that parties should represent definite 
human tendencies? 

In his History of Political Theory Dr. Simeon D. 
Fess, formerly president of Antioch College and 
now a member of Congress from Ohio says, "The 
rational diflFerentiation of political parties lies in 
the constitution of the mind. . . . Whether a man 
is naturally controversial or not, he ever insists 
upon the recognition of his rights. In political af- 
fairs he differs most frequently from his fellow upon 
method rather than matter. The conservative, who 
dislikes agitation for its own sake, is ever present. 
He chooses to suffer evils rather than risk the in- 
stitutions in the attempt to correct them. Not far 
from him usually stands the radical, who enjoys 
agitation and who has a propensity for righting 
wrongs at any price. . . . Where there are two 
controlling parties, one of them will be radical and 
the other conservative. This division is not con- 
sistent since it most frequently occurs that the 
radical today may become the conservative to- 
morrow, and vice versa. It may be affirmed with 
a degree of accuracy that the party out of power is 
the radical, but becomes conservative when placed 
in power." 

A generation ago Mr. Wilson, in his Congressional 



lOO THE NEW FRONTIER 

Government made the following estimate of parties: 
"It is probably also this lack of leadership which 
gives to our national parties their curious con- 
glomerate character. It would seem to be scarcely 
an exaggeration to say that they are homogeneous 
only in name. Neither of the two principal parties 
is of one mind with itself. Each tolerates all sorts 
of difference of creed and variety of aim within its 
own ranks. Each pretends to the same purposes 
and permits among its partisans the same contra- 
dictions to those purposes. . . . They are like 
armies without officers, engaged upon a campaign 
which has no great cause at its back. Their names 
and traditions, not their hopes and policy, keep them 
together." At the present time we cannot detect 
one single major issue of the slightest consequence 
to the public which is the exclusive possession of 
either of the great parties. This is unfortunate 
in a period which tries the very souls of men, 
when enlightened party leadership should have its 
greatest opportunity. 

After the Civil War, which had been conducted 
under the supreme leadership of a Republican presi- 
dent, the Republicans remained In power for twenty 
years, until the election of Cleveland. The present 
war was fought under the leadership of a Democrat; 
and this was fortunate, because the Democratic 
party had come into power on a platform which 
definitely opposed our entrance into war, so that 
upon the election of the Democrats and our actual 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD loi 

entrance into the war, the Republicans had no re- 
course but to support the action taken, which they 
did, from dictates of both patriotism and poHcy. 
It is impossible to intimate that either party is in 
any respect associated with anything unpatriotic. 
The issue of the next campaign, therefore, seems 
to be shaping itself along lines of personality and 
tradition. Men are Republicans because they have 
always been Republicans, and the Democrats like- 
wise, especially in the solid South where voters are 
only just beginning, in some of the larger cities, to 
believe that in national elections they should be 
permitted to vote with a national viewpoint and not 
be condemned to perpetual Democracy because of a 
local issue. 

Next in importance to tradition seems to be 
personality in the present situation; and the re- 
sponsibility of liberals is to see to it if possible that 
the man elected to head this nation in the four 
vital years which will follow 1920 is a man who has 
not only done some close and clear thinking upon 
the vital questions of the day, but who also ac- 
quired a sufficient contact through personal ex- 
perience with practical business affairs to make it 
likely that he will set in motion the machinery 
towards producing sound and lasting results. We 
need not simply a lover of America, but a man who 
will not require four years to learn how to turn his 
good intentions into concrete action. We cannot 
afford to elect a man with "a vague desire to make 



I02 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the world better, combined with absolute ignorance 
of how this is to be done." 

There has long been a demand for the business 
man in politics, and certainly the war developed at 
the head of some great department or commission 
in Washington a man with sufficient contact with 
the great problems of production as they bear upon 
the hves of our own people and the people abroad, 
and whose work at the same time brought him 
closely enough in touch with the homely point of 
view of the average citizen, to make him not only 
an ornament but a practical benefit, as leader of 
the nation. It is not sufficient in these critical 
years that we should have as leader in Washington 
a man with a fine upstanding personality, or a 
great orator, or a good soldier, or the author of a 
notable piece of legislation, or a spectacular obstruc- 
tionist. These qualities might prove useful. But 
the thinking citizen desires a man who knows and 
does not pretend to scorn the rudiments of politics, 
the machinery which must be used by a president if 
he is to be anything more than a well-wisher of the 
people. A man is needed who has had some experi- 
ence in the actual handling of the major problems, eco- 
nomic and social in character, for which it is already 
evident that our chief executive must assume 
definite personal responsibihty between 1921 and 
1925. 

Whoever this man is, he should be able to judge 
of the cause and effect of the wave of unrest which 



POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD 103 

is sweeping over the world. If America is to prosper, 
the leader who wins the next election will be a man 
with a national sympathy, and not a class or sec- 
tional sympathy; a man who will dare to stand for 
the principle that right is might. He will not try 
to run the government alone, and will not fear to 
draw around him men as strong as himself nor to give 
them freedom of action to carry out policies agreed 
upon. He will be big enough to consider the advice 
of experienced men, whether they be farmers or 
labor leaders or captains of industry, and grant 
special favors to none. He will not talk too much 
either about ideals or about action, but he will give 
daily evidence of a mastery of both. 

Such a man exists. It would be a tragedy for 
America in this turning point of history if he did 
not exist. He is a liberal . Neither the radicals nor 
the reactionaries of his party will nominate him. 
But the liberals of one of the great parties can do 
it, and never in our history was the concrete and 
specific need for the united action of American 
liberals more obviously demanded. 

It is a time when the man is more important than 
the party. Party platforms are vague; the need 
for an experienced executive in the White House is 
undeniable. But we live under a party system. The 
machinery of poHtics is necessary. It is no time for 
men to avoid party enrollment because they are 
more idealistic than the party leaders. Let them 
roll up their sleeves and get into the game. The 



I04 THE NEW ERONTIER 

only effective way to make a party great is to work 
and build within the party itself. A radical or a 
conservative who enrolls and votes according to his 
convictions is in this respect a better American than 
the liberal whose judgment may be sounder but who 
fails to enroll and to vote. 



PUBLIC OPINION AND THE INDUSTRIAL 
PROBLEM 

The public interest will inevitably determine the 
outcome of the present industrial problem. This 
chapter offers no technical solution for the present 
unrest. It does attempt to suggest a method of 
approach which may lead to a solution. 

The American genius for the practical can readily 
work out, in each one of the numerous technical 
branches of the industrial field, a plan which will 
be just and economically sound. The technical 
students of the subject have a wealth of ingenuity 
and experience to aid them. The ^raw material 
of industrial peace is ready to hand. What is 
lacking on the part of the majority of workers and 
employers is the will to reach a conclusion. They 
feel farther apart than they are. But as soon as 
liberal public opinion appreciates fully and specifi- 
cally the great stake which the people of America 
have in the establishment of permanent peace in the 
industrial world, it will increase its pressure for a 
settlement, and the settlement will come. 

What are some of the elements in the situation 
around which controversy turns? What does the 
public need to know before it can exert its irresistible 

los 



io6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

pressure for a gradual, common-sense working 
solution, a liberal solution? 

Ruskin remarked that "in general, pride is at the 
bottom of all great mistakes." It would be interest- 
ing to know how many controversies and perhaps 
wars would have been avoided in the history of the 
world if pride had not stepped in to prevent in- 
dividuals or nations from getting together. The 
pride that keeps a man from admitting he is wrong 
is something that requires for its correction the 
utmost common-sense, strength of character and 
sense of humor, all operating at once. This kind 
of pride is standing in the way of results today as 
it always has in the past. It is at the bottom of 
scores of strikes. It is responsible for an infinite 
variety of present-day ills. And it is surprising that 
this should be so when Americans perhaps as fully 
as any people in the world, value and applaud the 
very opposite of this besetting sin. We like to re- 
peat the story of Lincoln and McClellan. On one 
occasion when the General had shown scant respect 
for his President and Commander-in-Chief, Lincoln, 
with characteristic absence of false pride, said, *'I 
will hold McClellan's horse for him if he will only 
win us victories." 

The problem today of bringing capital and labor 
together is a problem of bringing together meny 
human beings capable of decision and understanding 
and sympathy. It is not a problem for persons too 
proud to admit the other man has some right on his 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 107 

side. And the victory we are after today is not a 
victory for either party to the controversy, but for 
a third party, the pubHc. The present situation 
involves a fight for hfe; but it is not a fight for the 
life of capitalism or a fight for the life of labor; it is 
a fight for the life of America and American in- 
stitutions. 

The tendencies toward suspicion and enmity in 
our industrial life have at times manifested them- 
selves in a shape which has amounted to civil war. 
There has been bitterness, and even bloodshed. At 
times, strikes have multiplied until the sources of 
food and other bodily comforts of large groups of 
our people have been seriously crippled. The com- 
ponent halves of industry have fought one another 
at the expense of the welfare of the world. 

Colonel Henry Watterson in his memoirs of a long 
life rich in its contacts with all phases of public 
affairs brings out an aspect of our Civil War which 
is pertinent to this discussion. Col. Watterson him- 
self fought on the Confederate side, although, as he 
states, he was opposed to both slavery and disunion. 

"The wise men of both sections," he says, "saw 
danger ahead. The North was warned that the 
South would fight, the South, that if it did it went 
against incredible odds. Neither would take the 
warning. Party spirit went wild. Extremism had its 
fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly war of sections 
■ — a fraternal war if there ever was one — brought 
on by alternating intolerance. . . . Anybody can 



io8 THE NEW FRONTIER 

now see that the slavery problem might have 
had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue 
might have been compromised from time to time 
and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even at the 
South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. 
The institution untenable, modern thought against 
it, from the first it was doomed. 

"But the extremists would not have it. Each 
played to the lead of the other. Whilst Wendell 
Phillips was preaching the equality of races, death 
to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at 
the North, William Lowndes Yancey was exclaiming 
that cotton was king at the South, and, to establish 
these false propositions, miUions of good Americans 
proceeded to cut one another's throats. ,«? 

*'The moral alike for governments and men is: 
Keep the middle of the road." 

At the end of a great war in which the men of the 
South and of the North fought side by side on the 
battlefields of France, we regard that other great war 
as a part of some strange and distant history. But 
it is well for us to have in mind that other elements 
of passion and prejudice still lie slumbering in the 
hearts of men, even men who are bound together by 
generations of common principles and common 
ideals. No one will deny today the good faith, 
either of the leaders of South Carohna or of the anti- 
slavery agitators of Boston. But the result of their 
failure to get together was the most bloody war 
which the world had ever seen. Good faithj then. 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 109 

Is not enough. There must be patience, also, and 
readiness to concede. This must be the American 
way, if it is to be said that we have learned the 
lesson of a most bitter conflict. 

The issues which stand in the way of industrial 
peace today cannot safely be approached with 
prejudice. There is nothing uncompromisable be- 
tween the demands of labor and the reservations 
of capital, except where either the demands of 
labor or the reservations of capital prove to be 
inconsistent with the American form of govern- 
ment. The teaching of this lesson by liberals is 
rendered difficult by the many professional agitators 
and organizers whose last desire it is to bring about 
in the American nation an orderly, fair and satis- 
factory solution of pressing pubhc problems. These 
individuals thrive upon disorder and agitation. 
Their name is agitator, their profession is agitation. 
If unrest were to cease they would have to do a day's 
honest work. And while here again it may be unfair 
to say that they are not acting in good faith, it is 
necessary to say that the pendulum of their minds 
has swung to an extreme which makes them danger- 
ous members of society, and if this Republic is to go 
forward in the middle of the road toward sane living 
and opportunity and happiness, we cannot be guided 
by persons who are still, as regards their method of 
getting results, closely affiliated in spirit with the 
anthropoid ape or the cave man. 

It is clear that the parties to the controversy do 



no THE NEW FRONTIER 

not understand each other. Any person experienced 
in such matters knows that a given group of labor 
representatives is certain to be wholly misinformed 
upon many essential features of business policy and 
organization, and any given group of business men 
is sure to number several who are wholly uninformed 
as to the real causes of industrial misunderstanding 
from the labor standpoint. 

Enlightened labor leaders believe in fair play and 
in the inviolability of contracts. And yet, when 
radicals are in the saddle, union members cannot be 
held by their leaders to the contracts as made. 
There are many things about labor unionism which 
are admitted to be in a tentative condition and 
•which are capable of adaptation to the needs of 
productive industrialism, provided the disease-spots 
of radicalism be cut out and a sufficiently representa- 
tive group of labor leaders assembled to work out a 
solution in cooperation with employers of labor. 

On the other hand there is an irreducible minimum 
of common sense and economic necessity which 
must be insisted upon by business men if productive 
industry is to go on. For this irreducible minimum 
business men of the country are willing to fight to 
the last ditch and with everything they have in 
them, with the facts in their full significance revealed 
to the general public to whom the employers and 
labor are alike responsible. The great overshadow- 
ing danger of the present situation, so tragic because 
so superficial, is that some business men, irritated 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM in 

and deeply concerned by radical attacks, have had 
the good old American fighting spirit aroused in 
them and are directing their attack on labor unions, 
whereas their real enemy is not labor unionism, as 
such, but rather the radical elements which are fol- 
lowing the false standard of "something for nothing," 
with the battle-cry of "rule or ruin." 

Unionism is not the issue. Our laws permit it. 
And despite its striking failure to control its own 
people, under proper guidance it may be a powerful 
force for justice. Take for example a situation hke 
the printers' troubles in New York in the fall of 
1919. A fair statement of the main points in this 
somewhat complicated case seems to be that the 
international unions, representing the American 
Federation of Labor, were as firmly committed as 
any group of men could be to the maintenance of 
contracts on a basis which would enable the employ- 
ing printers to buy paper and enter into agreements 
for printing books and carrying on their business 
with reasonable profit. In other words, the em- 
ployers and the union leaders had arrived at a 
bargain which was, under the circumstances, satis- 
factory to both; and then came the radical element 
within some of the unions themselves, refusing to 
abide by the agreements reached, insisting upon 
immediate radical increases of salary, immediate 
shorter hours. In addition, they declined to be 
bound by any definite agreement which would make 
it possible for the business men for whom they were 



112 THE NEW FRONTIER 

working to make contracts and to purchase material, 
an agreement vital to the public interest and to 
the workers themselves whose existence depends 
upon the success of the industry. In this situation 
the international leaders without hesitation took 
away the union cards from the insurgent employees 
and formed new unions. They stated unequivocally 
that they stood for fair dealing and the maintenance 
of contracts, and pointed out with no little show of 
reason that they were in a better position to treat 
with the radical element than were the employing 
printers themselves. 

Years ago Theodore Roosevelt said that the 
American people were not opposed to trusts, but 
only to bad trusts. Today most business men are 
not opposed to unionism but only to bad unionism. 
By bad unionism is meant the aim of a class to 
further the rights of a class, by argument if possible, 
but by force if necessary, and without regard to the 
rights of the people as a whole. 

Is this a fair statement of the attitude of business? 
Are the leaders of American business fair and liberal.'' 
If so the public should know it. The interests of the 
nation as a whole at this time call for the elimination 
of the age-long disease to which the business world 
has been susceptible, of allowing its views to be 
represented by a few outspoken ultra-conservatives 
whose statements are quickly taken up and flaunted 
by the radicals, and to a large extent even by the 
liberals, as representative of the attitude of business 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 113 

as a whole. A generation ago a business leader was 
quoted (and the facts seem to indicate, misquoted) 
as having exclaimed, *'The Public be Damned!" 
As a result of the wide dissemination of this phrase 
milHons of people honestly believed for years that 
the majority of business men entertained that point 
of view. There are far too many people who believe 
that attitude is maintained today; whereas it often 
seems that the rights of the public are more fully 
taken into consideration today even by conservative 
business men than they are, by-and-large, by 
radical labor leaders. It would certainly seem 
within reason to quote Messrs. Foster and Fitz- 
patrlck as having said, "The Public be Damned!'* 

The fact is, we must get away from all this calling 
of names and imputing of motives. Before any 
far-reaching and permanent readjustment in the in- 
dustrial world can be looked for there is a funda- 
mental necessity, first of all, for a different attitude 
on both sides. There are too many chips on too 
many shoulders. The correct fundamental attitude 
of mind and heart is as subtle as it is important. It 
is the factor most frequently ignored in current dis- 
cussions. It is not in itself a solution; but it is the 
open door, and the only door to a solution. The 
misconceptions in the public mind regarding both 
capital and labor are so stubbornly adhered to, so 
widely accepted, that their continued existence 
would form an insuperable obstacle to an era of 
good feeling. So long as a very large group of people 



114 THE NEW FRONTIER 

believe that Wall Street, for example, or business 
as a whole, is entirely self-seeking, just so long will 
it be impossible for leaders of industry to reach the 
hearts and minds of men on a basis of sympathetic 
understanding. So long as radical leaders are per- 
mitted to dominate the councils of labor and give 
the public the idea that their plighted word is a 
mere mask covering a greedy opportunism which 
lies in wait to throw contracts to the wind and 
upset the course of business because the "going is 
good," so long will it be impossible to get business 
leaders to regard the position of labor with the 
confidence :and sympathy and open-mindedness 
which will lead to industrial democracy. Industrial 
democracy cannot be brought about by the weapons 
of autocracy. The will to agree has been lacking, 
and without that, the most carefully thought out 
understandings and contracts must rest upon a 
basis of sand. Without that, conferences will be a 
waste of time for both sides. 

Some progress is being made. The study and 
analysis being carried on by the colleges is helping 
to bring about a common body of facts and princi- 
ples, based on wide research. Industrial engineers 
are doing splendid work. Public conferences under 
governmental and private auspices serve to focus 
public thought on the problem. Largely through 
the influence of Herbert Hoover the Second Indus- 
trial Conference, held in Washington, made a report 
on March 6, 1920, which is the fairest and most 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 115 

thorough liberal document on the industrial problem 
yet put forth, And all the while, the normal course 
of progress in actual plants is helping to furnish 
examples of capital and labor united to produce 
the necessaries of life with American skill, energy 
and full cooperation. Here and there a plant is* 
being conducted along cooperative lines. These 
laboratories of industrial progress are useful. But 
they are too exceptional to be an answer to 
the nation-wide failure to get together which 
periodically puts the consumer in a state of mind 
bordering upon despair. Unrest is so contagious 
that in prosperous times the disease spreads and 
even isolated factories organized on a basis of 
industrial cooperation are drawn into the general 
turmoil. The average man reads stories of actual 
experiences such as "How Jim and Bill Manage 
Themselves," "How My Men Help Me Manage"; 
and the next day he reads of a score of strikes called 
or threatened, involving his daily bread or other 
essentials to his health and comfort, and somehow, 
the titles sound hollow to him. 

Evidently the normal course of industrial evolution 
is not enough. We need the working solution of 
problems in a thousand factories; but this is not 
sufficient if a thousand more are closed. Only when 
public opinion is convinced that reasonable conces- 
sions and adjustments have been made by both 
sides and that both of the integral parts of the 
working machinery that keeps the public alive, are 



Ii6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

acting in full understanding, then only will this 
powerful force be brought to bear with full effective- 
ness against extreme or unjust action on the part 
of either. Conferences and conventions will not 
furnish a solution. Technical analysis and industrial 
engineering will not solve it. But all these per- 
sistently working together, with the deep desire to 
solve it, cannot fail to do it. Nothing can solve 
it if the spirit of suspicion and enmity dominates 
every approach to the problem. 

We might as well face the fact that, in spite of 
glib Utopians, the problem is an extremely difficult 
one involving an almost infinite variety of economic 
and human factors. 

What do the workers want from the employers.? 
On Labor Day, 191 9, a statement professing to em- 
body the aspirations and desires of American Labor 
and quoting an official high in organized labor circles, 
was issued by the Amejican Alliance for Labor and 
Democracy. The statement was as follows: "As a 
result of the great world war the labor problem has 
been more prominently brought to the attention of 
the people of our country than ever before. To 
prevent this growing unrest that is leading many to 
the doctrines of Bolshevism is the responsibility of 
everyone of us who believes that sane methods 
rather than insane should be applied. How is this 
to be accomplished? The old idea of a living wage 
will have to be revised so that every comfort of life 
consistent with the station of the worker shall be 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 117 

enjoyed by him and his dependents. Life's comforts 
must be graded upward in the future. Labor be- 
lieves that it is entitled to this, as it did most to 
save the world for democracy. American living 
standards should not be jeopardized by those of any 
other nation. Unfair competition, either to business 
interests or to labor, must be prevented. If the 
idea of social and economic justice to the workers 
receives due consideration I feel sure that the danger 
of the spread of Bolshevism will be reduced to a 
minimum, if not entirely removed. This doctrine, 
as we know, thrives upon industrial unrest, and by 
removing the cause the disease will soon disappear. 
We have saved the world for democracy; now let 
us save democracy for the world. 

"Bolshevism is an impossible doctrine. If the 
workers of this or any other country are not to 
receive social and economic justice in any other 
way than through a revolutionary movement that 
would destroy government, then it is best that the 
world should cease to be rather than to live under 
the conditions proposed by the doctrines of Bol- 
shevism. It is too much to expect that the organized 
labor movement of America should be left to cope 
alone with this industrial unrest. It can be dealt 
with by a triangle of government, capital, and labor 
working in full cooperation with each other and 
without force, as Bolshevism cannot be cured by 
killing or clubbing. Improved industrial life and 
the removal of many of the oppressive conditions 



ii8 THE NEW FRONTIER 

that workers are living under will successfully meet 
the situation. It will not only remove the extreme 
radical tendencies, but in my opinion, is the solution 
of the Americanization of the foreign element and 
will make them fully understand what America and 
American citizenship in their fullest sense really 
stand for." 

This statement is not inconsistent with the hberal 
point of view. It is a significant statement, if it is 
at all representative of the liberal labor viewpoint, 
and there is no reason to believe it is not. It spe- 
cifically disavows the right to speak for the extreme 
radical group; but it may fairly be said to represent 
the majority of labor opinion. 

The truth appears to be that in America labor is 
not at heart revolutionary. On the other hand 
labor is easily led into disquieting excesses for the 
simple reason that its leaders have not set before 
themselves or the public clearly and fairly what the 
workers really want. As a result, the workers are 
constantly being led into making demands which are 
unreasonable because the leaders of labor cannot 
unite on a fair and reasonable platform, or in fact, 
upon any platform whatever. Labor is using the 
weapon of last resort before giving other measures 
the utmost chance; and the public interest, the 
welfare of the great mass of men, women and children 
of this country, demands that conference and arbi- 
tration should in each instance of dispute be given 
the most exhaustive trial before strikes are called. 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 119 

The freedom with which the strike has recently been 
resorted to, with its attendant ill-feeling and often 
bloodshed, is the greatest single obstacle to sanity 
and clear thinking on both sides. The strike connotes 
force; it stimulates the imagination of conservative 
men to conjure up^ the over-turn of the economic 
structure, the institutions of government, and even 
the home itself. And this breeds a desperate feeling 
of resistance, of fighting back, of grim determination 
to hold on to those things which are most sacred in 
life. First of all, a great deal of patience is needed 
on both sides; and the will to get together. No 
rules and regulations, nor all the constitutions and 
covenants in the world, will avail unless both sides 
feel a determination to get together for the common 
good, instead of setting up fixed objects to be gained 
at any cost, and maintaining a grim "nothing to 
arbitrate" spirit. 

What does labor want ? Whether its demands are 
fair or practicable from the standpoint of the public 
remains to be seen. But it is vitally important that 
both capital and the public should follow in detail 
just what the demands are which are crystallizing 
in labor circles. A fair statement of their position 
would seem to embody the following line of thought: 
It is not wages and hours which underlie the present 
restlessness. It is a growing self-consciousness, an 
increasing desire for a part in the really glorious 
achievement of America, a wish, possibly only half- 
realizedy to be more consciously active and self-reliant 



120 THE NEW FRONTIER 

participants in the building up of the nearest approach 
the world has yet seen to a land of human freedom. 

Labor wants the cards laid on the table. The men 
in the mill want to know what profits are being made. 
This does not mean that executives are not to receive 
hundred thousand dollar salaries when they earn 
them. But it does mean that the men who help 
to produce the goods want to know that all those who 
share in the profits get a fair share only, on the 
basis of the work they do or the capital they lend. 
Translating the actual balance sheet into simple 
language that can be understood by every worker, 
will do much in removing suspicion and misunder- 
standing, and consequent discontent and suscepti- 
bility to radical agitation. Ignorance on the part 
of the workers is the agitators' greatest single 
source of strength. 

The next point to make definite is that labor does 
not want to abolish brains, initiative, imagination, 
organization ability, expert skill, salesmanship, clever 
advertising. In the words of a student and lucid 
exponent of this problem, Mr. Alfred E. Zimmern, 
"Industrial democracy . . . does not mean handing 
over the control of matters requiring expert knowl- 
edge to a mass of people who are not equipped with 
that knowledge. Under any system of management 
there must be division of labor; there must be 
those who know all about one subject and are best 
fitted to deal with it. Democracy can be just as 
successful as any other form of government in em- 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 121 

ploying experts. Nor does democratic control, in 
the present stage at any rate, involve a demand for 
control over what may be called the commercial 
side of management — the buying of the raw ma- 
terial, the selling of the finished article, and all the 
exercise of trained judgment and experience that 
are brought to bear by business men on these ques- 
tions. ... At present at any rate the workers 
demand not a voice in the business, but control 
over the conditions under which their own daily 
work is done. It is a demand for control over one 
side, but that the most important side because it 
is the human side, of the industrial process." 

Paul V. Kellog and Arthur Gleason in British 
Labor and The War reach the same conclusion 
with regard to the new spirit of labor: "The 
Workers' control movement is not attempting 
to commandeer factories and put them into the 
hands of the workers, like the Russian Soviets. It 
is going ahead one step at a time, first administering 
workshop conditions, then sharing in the manage- 
ment of the factory process. It is not trying to 
extemporize executive experience over night. It 
acts inside its area of competence, but the change it 
is eff'ecting in the organization of industry is funda- 
mental. . . . Labor is developing something different 
from the old-time class-conscious socialism. ... It is 
an experimental attitude toward life. The spirit of 
its quest is springy and buoyant and impudent. An 
elan is being recaptured, lost for one hundred years 



122 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of the factory system. From the ranks of the re-^ 
turned soldiers and the mobiUzed shops new leaders 
will spring up, and they will be young." 

What is wanted is a relationship which recognizes 
the rights of all parties in the industrial world, 
which is awake to the fact that the happiness of 
mankind is not based upon money alone, and that 
most men will work harder and for less money if 
they are working partly for themselves than they 
will if they are working wholly for someone else. 
Our problem therefore is to adapt the system based 
purely on wages to a new order in which there is 
added a human, democratic, conscious participation 
by all concerned. If this is done, the days of union- 
ism, belligerent and wholly unmindful of the public 
interest, will be numbered. This viewpoint, which 
is coming to be accepted with singular unanimity by 
thinking men the world over, is well expressed in a 
paragraph of the once famous Whitley Report which 
was adopted by the British War Cabinet in October, 
1917, "as part of the policy which they hope to see 
carried into effect in the field of industrial recon- 
struction." The statement is as follows: "We have 
thought it well to refrain from making suggestions 
or offering opinions with regard to such matters as 
profit-sharing, co-partnership, or particular systems 
of wages, etc. . . . We are convinced . . . that a 
permanent improvement in the relations between 
employers and employed must be founded upon 
something other than a cash basis. What is wanted, 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 123 

is that the work-people should have a greater oppor- 
tunity of participating in the discussion about and 
adjustment of those parts of industry by which they 
are most affected." 

In America the majority of liberal men are think- 
ing along the same lines. Herbert Hoover, probably 
the soundest and most effective exponent in America 
today of the Hberal viewpoint in industry, in a recent 
address said: "This social ferment . . . grows funda- 
mentally out of a yearning for higher standards of 
living, demand for economic change in the status 
of labor. ... It appears to me that any solution of 
this problem must go deeper than questions of 
strikes, lock-outs or arbitration, for these pre- 
suppose a conflict of interest. We have got to go 
sooner or later to the root of this difficulty. There is 
no solution short of community of interest. We 
must begin by creating, somehow and somewhere, 
a solidarity of interest in every section of the people 
conducting our industrial machine. The worker, 
the administrator and the employer are absolutely 
interdependent on one another in this task of secur- 
ing the maximum production and a better division 
of its results. It is hopeless to secure a solution if 
we are to set these people up as different classes 
fighting with each other." 

Will H. Hays, Chairman of the Republican Na- 
tional Committee, puts it this way: "It is simply a 
matter of Roosevelt's 'square deal' — exact justice 
for labor, exact justice for capital, and exact justice 



124 THE NEW FRONTIER 

for the public, the third side of the triangle, which 
must not be lost sight of. To that end we must 
develop a reasonable method for honest and efficient 
labor to acquire an interest in the business to which 
labor is expected to give its best efforts." 

The men who are most anxious, however, to reduce 
the theory of industrial democracy to a practical 
basis which will stimulate production and guarantee 
human existence are obstructed by the attitude of 
the radicals who want not a share in the business 
but all the business. These radicals will not con- 
sider any compromise, based upon reason and 
justice, and fair to both sides. The liberals among 
business and labor leaders could get together if they 
would take the matter into their own hands. But 
the proposals of the radicals go beyond what we in 
American today are justified in regarding as reason- 
able. As one writer has said: "If organized labor is 
conceded the right to tie up all the industry and 
commerce of the country at its own will our form of 
government will have been changed. Authority 
over the community life will have passed from the 
regularly elected representatives of the people to 
the labor organizations. The pubhc wants labor to 
have a fair show . . . but not supreme power. . . . 
It is the first principle of organized society that 
everybody shall be equal before the law, and that 
no individual shall put his personal judgment above 
the law. The overthrow of this principle would mean 
the destruction of order and government. The rule 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 125 

of reason and of the ballot-box would be over- 
thrown, and society would lapse back to the rule of 
force." 

This aspect of the problem involves not labor 
and capital alone, but the very fundamentals of our 
national life. If one class is to rule autocratically, 
it is a situation calling not for conferences on in- 
dustrial cooperation but rather a new Constitution. 

Before proceeding farther it may be of interest to 
present an outside view of our industrial situation. 
Not long ago some of the views expressed in this 
chapter were discussed with an able foreigner 
temporarily in America as a delegate to the Inter- 
national Labor Conference. He was for niany years 
in Washington at his Legation, has traveled all over 
the United States, and is a keen and discriminating 
student of our people and institutions. His view- 
point may be briefly paraphrased as follows: 

"The American people are facing a great crisis. 
Your labor, while better off than labor in some 
countries of Europe, has long ceased to be contented 
with the wage system. The average American 
laborer is not discontented with his wages or hours 
of work; but whether or not the rank and file are 
fully conscious of the fact, it is none the less true 
that the wage system has ceased to satisfy. Some 
form of industrial self-government must come. 
Leaders of labor and enlightened capitalists recognize 
it, and the fundamental unrest, going to the very 
roots of the labor groups, organized and unorganized, 



126 THE NEW FRONTIER 

proves that no tinkering will meet the needs of the 
situation. 

"Your business men as a class are fundamentally- 
more democratic in sympathy, or potentially so, 
than any similar group in the world. But on the 
other hand, they are busier, they are under a greater 
pressure to get results. The very extent of your 
problem carries with it a great pressure upon the 
average business executive and makes it harder to 
induce him to take time to consider some of the 
phases of the industrial problem which now call for 
immediate action if most serious consequences are 
to be avoided. The word 'results' must take on a 
broader meaning. 

"Many of the great crises of history have arisen 
because someone was too late. We fear our own 
business men have waited too long and that matters 
will go to extremes before a fair working basis can 
be established. In your country I believe the 
existence of Americanism, that fundamental faith 
in yourselves, that chronic optimism amounting to 
an almost child-like belief that the right and fair 
thing will prevail, that love of your country and its 
institutions which really mean so much to so many 
of your people, may still serve to avert the danger 
that seems to be sweeping across the world from 
Russia. This Americanism is unique. There is 
nothing that quite corresponds to it anywhere else 
in the world. It may keep your people sane until 
all classes see the need of definite corrective action. 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 127 

But nothing will avail you long unless you set up 
against radicalism a great wall of fairly treated 
men and women. These workers, the backbone of 
your industries, have reached a point where wages 
no longer satisfy them, and only a feeling that they 
have some voice in determining the conditions under 
which they work will ever bring about contentment. 

"There is the same voice of destiny in this move- 
ment the world over that exists in your country, 
except that your greater democracy here has given 
your workers a greater patriotism and has held back 
their consciousness that democracy in industry did 
not exist. But even in America it is coming. It is 
as sure as your national independence was sure to 
the discerning eye long before the Declaration of 
Independence, and as the freedom of your negroes 
seemed inevitable to the far-seeing student long 
before 1864. Both those great events involved vast 
differences of opinion; both involved bloodshed 
which might have been avoided. The world is 
looking to America, the home of liberty and de- 
mocracy, to lead the way in the greatest problem 
of all time, the adjustment of the conditions of 
production at a time when millions will die if that 
adjustment is interfered with. Is it too late?" 

Is it too late? Can we get together? If we can 
assume that the men who represent both the labor 
and the capital viewpoints in the present industrial 
controversy are loyal Americans and believe in the 
traditions ot America, it does not seem too much to 



128 THE NEW FRONTIER 

hope that if they will make the same organized 
effort to get together that they make on the one 
hand to organize great business interests and on the 
other to organize milUons of men into labor unions 
it will be perfectly feasible to bring about a working 
solution. The brains and ability to get together are 
here; but the determination to agree has not yet 
crystallized. Perhaps we must wait until the vague 
desire for industrial adjustment in the mind of the 
average man who has waited so long and patiently 
for the doctors to agree, gives place to a demand for 
industrial cooperation and peace. If a nation-wide 
poll were taken at the present time it would be 
overwhelmingly evident that the great majority of 
Americans believe that capital and labor can well 
get together somewhere between a complete socializa- 
tion of all industry and a complete individual and com- 
petitive license. It is also true that the situation calls 
for an agreement without an undue amount of time 
being devoted to the luxury of listening to the expres- 
sion of either radical or reactionary points of view 
while the world is threatened with disease and starva- 
tion because of the falling off in the production of 
the necessaries of life. 

The necessity of production is the phase of the 
situation which makes it one of permanent public 
concern. There are already too many people in the 
world to be provided for adequately by the bare 
resources of nature. Population grows at a rapid 
pace, and while during the past century and a 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 129 

puarter the development of new natural resources 
and of new technical arts has increased faster than 
population, it is none the less true that in most parts 
of the world, population is actually pressing close 
upon the minimum of subsistence, and, for a con- 
siderable part of the world, population is too great 
for comfort. In the United States, the richest 
country of all the world, there is still not enough to 
go around. We have felt this increasingly during 
the war, but it was true before the war. Approxi- 
mately ninety milHon people of the United States, 
exclusive of outlying possessions, received an income 
in 1910 of somewhat more than $30,000,0x30,000, 
including all wages, interest, profits and rents. It 
is estimated that about $2,500,000,000 of this was 
taken for the support of Federal, State and local 
governments. At least $4,000,000,000 more was 
taken for additions to the productive equipment 
or capital of the country. This leaves not over 
$24,000,000,000 for current consumption during the 
year, which gives $260 per person or $1300 a year 
for a family of five. The richest country in the whole 
world is not very rich. 

It must be evident that any solution of the problem 
which presupposes a desire for the life of the race 
must be predicated upon work. Certain economic 
truths must prevail in the end. A dollar must be 
earned. No group of men, no matter how much 
power they temporarily accumulate, can go on getting 
something for nothing; because in the last analysis 



130 'vTHE NEW FRONTIER 

the something has to be produced by somebody. 
And if the something produced is turned over to 
somebody for nothing, it will simply cease to be 
produced. A dollar must be earned before it can 
be paid out in wages, and if wages are pushed to the 
point where production is unprofitable the where- 
withal to pay wages will be lacking. And let no one 
delude himself that the next step is for the Govern- 
ment to take over industry and thus make available 
an indefinite supply of money to pay wages; be- 
cause it is a truth that, if we eliminate printing- 
press money, even Government money must be 
earned by someone's work before it is acquired by 
the Government through taxation; and an indefinite 
increase of taxation would soon tend to eliminate 
the golden supply upon which the taxation is based. 
If it is understood that labor is not after something 
for nothing, capital will go a long way to meet any 
conditions approved by public opinion. There is a 
deep interest among liberal-minded business men in 
the question: Will labor representation in the 
management of business enterprises lead to greater 
contentment and better industrial production? If 
experience proves that the answer should be in the 
affirmative, there will be no room for further dis- 
cussion of the subject. But up to the present, 
labor leaders themselves have failed to give definite 
assurances upon this crucial point; and the existing 
experience is not sufficient to enable the great body 
of forward-looking business men to form a working 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 131 

business judgment on the question. Up to this 
time, the emphasis has been upon ever-increasing 
wages and ever-decreasing hours. The time has 
come, however, when the leaders of thought in the 
business world are asking whether a greater participa- 
tion of the employes in decisions affecting their own 
welfare cannot be arrived at in an orderly and 
equitable manner. It is fair to ask these leaders, 
also, how far the unlimited right of bequest or in- 
heritance is an essential part of the right of private 
property, and in general what can be done by com- 
bined American intelligence, ingenuity and organiz- 
ing power to alleviate conditions for which no class 
of Americans is wholly responsible, but in which the 
nation as a whole has a direct interest, conditions 
which are not going to be relieved by the pouring 
forth of impassioned oratory from soap boxes, useful 
as this may be as a safety-valve. 

The majority of Americans realize that the present 
industrial system is an evolution from comparatively 
meager beginnings. It is producing the essentials of 
the life of mankind. The men now chiefly in charge 
of it are contributing all they have in them to keep- 
ing it in order. They know its vital importance to 
our people. They are as eager as any men can be 
to keep this heritage sound and clean. They must 
be shown wherein the public interest demands new 
machinery, because if new machinery is to be in- 
stalled no one can do it half so well as they can do it. 
The people of America need them; for they are 



132 THE NEW FRONTIER 

typical Americans, with all their energy, their over- 
readiness to fight before they think, their restless 
desire for results, and at the same time their human 
sympathy, their eagerness to play fair if the other 
fellow will play fair too. 

These are some of the considerations with which 
liberal thought must concern itself in studying the 
industrial problem. The practical as well as the 
theoretical must be surveyed. Many plans must be 
tried. Many will fail. None will prove universally 
applicable. But none will be useful in any degree un- 
less it comes out of a conference not of violent 
partisans, but of Americans who recognize that the 
problem is national and not sectional. The task 
must be handled by the most broad-minded and tact- 
ful men in the community, men who will give it 
consistent thought and make sacrifices to put their 
solutions into working operation. 

The way to get together is to get together. But 
before results can be looked for, both sides are in 
need of education and clear thinking and, above all, 
catch words must be eliminated. It is very easy to 
dismiss a troublesome person by saying that he is a 
radical or an anarchist or a Bolshevik; and the 
person thus characterized does not help matters by 
coming back at his accuser with ''Reactionary!" 
or "Bourbon!" We live in an age of trade-marks 
and catch words, and the process of eliminating 
prejudices and convictions based upon misinforma- 
tion is no small task. 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 133 

A prominent labor leader recently said that in 
most cases representatives of the employes in a partic- 
ular plant could get together with the employer with- 
out much difficulty, but the trouble was that no 
general plan could ever be worked out, because no two 
employers could get together. This is something to 
think over carefully. But once let these men get 
together and a new result will appear. If the brains 
to be found in America today will get together 
nothing is impossible. No sane American will say 
a thing is impossible when it has never been tried 
once. Lock a few groups of liberal Americans in a 
room away from business and telephones and other 
diversions and see if they do not come out with 
something closely akin to results. It will not be a 
Utopia, but it will be progress. 

Some people do not believe in conferences and 
conventions. This is not because the gathering of 
men together to confer and exchange views is not 
in itself a good thing. It is because busy men have 
so often been gathered together for annual conven- 
tions which have little excuse for existence other 
than the fact of their being annual. Conventions 
called for special objects can work wonders. Our 
own Constitutional Convention brought order out 
of chaos and saved our infant nation from dis- 
integration. Political conventions sometimes ac- 
complish results. One of them nominated Abraham 
Lincoln. Conventions have played a great part in 
America in the development of leadership. And 



134 THE NEW FRONTIER 

furthermore, these meetings serve to focus upon the 
problem in hand the minds of the people at home; 
and perhaps while the deliberations are going forward 
in convention the people at home will get to work 
and settle the problem for themselves. Certainly 
conventions, if properly handled, keep the com- 
munity from sitting back and complaining; and 
often they pave the way for the precise, definite, 
careful action upon which permanent results in the 
long run must always rest. If the basic principles 
are to be found, if the raw materials of industrial 
peace exist in America, it is our own fault if we do 
not apply them cooperatively to the solution of our 
difficulties. We can only blame ourselves if we do 
not go at the task with a fi.rm belief that it can be 
accomplished. 

It may be doubted whether a change of attitude 
such as must take place if the needs of the present 
situation are to be satisfied can be brought about 
over night. Industrial reorganization cannot be 
solidly established with "dramatic suddenness" as 
one able American writer believes. But no one 
knows how much can be done, because the brains 
and drive of American industry, both labor and 
capital, have never really got at it with the will to 
agree. Here is what Glenn Frank says about it in 
one of his suggestive papers recently published under 
the title, "The Politics of Industry": 

"I think I could name twenty leaders of American 
business and industry who at this moment hold it 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 135 

within their power to determine the course of in- 
dustrial relations in this country for the next twenty- 
five years at least. What I mer.n concretely is this: 
There are twenty outstanding leaders of American 
business and industry who have always been . 
concerned primarily with the financial problem of 
industry; if these twenty men should pool their 
brain-power in a study of the labor problem with the 
same sustained thought they have given to financial 
problems, if they should counsel with students of 
labor as they have counseled with students of chem- 
ical, electrical, and other problems that touch their 
business interests, and if they should take the initia- 
tive in making a sincere and exhaustive study of 
the whole area lying between the extreme forms of 
private capitalism and the extreme forms of State 
Socialism in order to find out whether or not there 
is a middle ground of industrial self-government on 
which both labor and capital can stand in a co- 
operation that will minister to the legitimate aims 
of both, I have no hesitancy in saying that they — 
these twenty business and industrial leaders — 
could with dramatic suddemiess invent a new order of 
industry. I am not being carried away with rhetoric. 
I have seen enough instances of industrial self-gov- 
ernment at work to know that the tested principles 
of free, responsible, and representative government 
can be adapted to business and industry in a 
manner that will go far toward eliminating the waste 
of labor conflicts, uncovering hitherto unused re- 



136 THE NEW FRONTIER 

serves of enterprise and ingenuity in the working 
force, largely freeing the time of executives from the 
administration of discipHne which today drains 
away valuable executive energy that should be em- 
ployed in the larger creative tasks of policy and 
expansion, and actually making business and in- 
dustry more profitable. . . . The constitutional 
problem that our political fathers faced, our business 
men face today in business and industry under the 
name of the problem of management or control. 
Until that problem is solved by genuine business 
statesmanship, the labor problem will doubtless con- 
tinue as a balance of power game of see-saw, and in 
the midst of every labor conflict we shall hear the 
familiar jibes that labor's only interest is in shorter 
hours and higher wages and that capital's only 
interest is in longer hours and lower wages, jibes 
that fly wide of the mark simply because no one 
faces boldly the real challenge of the labor problem. 
The American public is waiting for a business 
statesmanship that will attack the government 
problem in industry." 

One is led to ask what these twenty men have 
been doing during, let us say, the past ten years, if 
they had it in them to solve this problem so readily. 
Not one of them but has individually thought deeply 
on this outstanding problem of his business life. 
Perhaps the trouble is that they have not thought 
deeply together. But it would be unfortunate to 
encourage false hopes for the emergence of an all- 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 137 

embracing settlement of the industrial problem from 
the minds of any group of twenty men. The in- 
dustrial situation is not a problem in mathematics 
capable of exact and precise solution. There is 
no great mystery involved. The great point is 
that the problem bears upon the development of 
mutual sympathy and understanding between groups 
of human beings. It will not be solved, therefore, 
by individuals regarding each other as cogs 
in the industrial machine. It will be solved when 
labor and capital get around a table and regard 
one another as men. It may not be possible with 
** dramatic suddenness" to bring about the un- 
selfishness which underlies all successful cooperation; 
it may be difficult to establish the basic necessity 
which cannot be mentioned too frequently, the 
desire to trade, the readiness to make concessions, 
the mutual will to get together. If this desire, to 
trade, to make concessions, does not exist, it must 
be developed with all the energy of an ingenious 
and hardy race. When this has been achieved, all 
other things shall be added unto it. Until it is 
achieved there can be no industrial peace. 

Meanwhile the enUghtened business men and 
publicists and labor leaders will keep on trying to get 
a working solution so long as they continue to love 
their country. America is worth a hundred con- 
ferences, all unsuccessful, if number one hundred 
and one progresses a little better, and one hundred 
and twelve, gathering up the cumulative benefit of 



138 THE NEW FRONTIER 

all that has gone before, finally hits upon the work- 
ing solution. Perhaps one of these days a group of 
conferees may find that they are agreed, that their 
minds have met on common ground which the 
public will approve. And then we shall begin to 
feel this great pressure hft from our hearts, and as 
a united country we may turn our eyes outward 
and not inward, and go forward another stage on 
the highway of American destiny. 

As a concluding suggestion, a word may be said 
for the necessity of a wider reading as a step toward 
sounder capitalist leadership. It is not a difficult 
task for the average man to keep in touch with 
books which cover the latest thought of experts on 
the problems of the day. The world is moving at 
such a pace that most books are out of date by the 
time they come off the presses. But insofar as 
they treat of fundamentals and reveal an honest 
attitude of mind they contain the raw material to 
work with in reaching a solution of current prob- 
lems. It is as necessary to have the other man's 
point of view as it is to know one's own. It may 
be frankly stated that many men who would be 
capable of vigorous liberal leadership know neither. 

We should read the opinions of the man who 
believes we are wholly wrong in our thought and 
action. A writer who can find a pubHsher is sure 
to find some readers, and some of his readers are 
likely to beheve what he has written. The litera- 
ture of wide and influential circulation attacking 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 139 

the men who are depended upon for industrial 
leadership today, who have won their right to lead 
in most cases by native abihty in a highly competi- 
tive field, would amaze many of these men if they 
stopped to read. They must stop to read. It will 
help them to define their own beliefs, and to realize 
the strength and intelligence of radical reformers who 
cannot safely be ignored by liberal or even by con- 
servative thought. The wider public is giving these 
radicals a very considerable hearing, and it is not 
good tactics to underestimate such opponents, 
much less to ignore them. 

Business men say they are too busy to read. 
Few of them accomplish as much work in a year 
as did Theodore Roosevelt; and yet in the most 
strenuous days of his presidency he read constantly, 
liberally, all kinds of books. And yet no one could 
call Roosevelt "bookish." He could "tear the 
heart out of a book." This is an art which is highly 
valuable in this time of complexity of interests and 
multiplication of printed matter. If business leaders 
believe that everything about the industrial system 
of this country is right, they will simply continue 
their arduous job of operating the vast machinery 
of production, while the radicals operate the print- 
ing presses. But if they believe the world moves 
forward and that the shaping of the minds of men 
through the printed word is a vital element in 
guiding national progress, if they believe in the 
force of education, both sound and unsound, they 



I40 THE NEW FRONTIER 

will realize that the case of the radicals has been 
presented at least with skill and vigor, and that it 
is not wise or right or American for captains of 
industry to remain silent and let the case go against 
them by default. 

For it is not their personal case that is under dis- 
cussion. It is to a very important degree the cause 
of the American people. A substantial portion of 
these people are today relying upon the good faith, 
the integrity, the vision of business leadership. 
These men can do no less than to keep studying, 
with open minds, the points of view expressed by 
competent persons on all phases of this great prob- 
lem, a problem which can never be completely 
solved and laid to rest because it is the embodiment 
of the living interplay of human emotions, instincts 
and ambitions. This is what some business leaders 
have for years been doing. To do less than this is 
to have put business leadership in the position of 
violating a sacred trust. In this way only can we 
arrive at industrial evolution instead of stagnation 
periodically disturbed by petty rebellion. The 
remedy of today will not be the remedy of next 
year; but if there is the right kind of leadership, 
we shall be ready to meet next year's problem when 
next year comes around. - 

Incidentally, it is notable that very few business 
men find time, in America, to write books. This 
is not true of other countries. It is to be regretted, 
because in an age of specialization it has been left 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 141 

too much to one group of men to do the work and to 
another group of men to become professional critics 
of the way the work is done. BeHeving as we do in 
speciahzation it would be idle to expect that men 
who must spend long days in the actual affairs of 
business or politics can often produce a brilliant 
or even workmanlike exposition of those affairs in 
the shape of books. But what is lacking in literary 
distinction may in some cases be made up in the 
value of a point of view which is being given an 
actual try-out in the arena of practical affairs. 

One reason why liberal business men as a group 
do not do more writing is because their daily life 
is made up of a series of compromises between the 
ideals at which they aim and what can be accom- 
plished under the resistless pressure of daily busi- 
ness life. There are today many business men, 
highly successful business men, who in another 
century might have been poets or explorers or 
builders of cathedrals, but in this crowded and 
highly developed age they have been attracted by 
the stern conflicts and endlessly complicated ven- 
tures of the world of business. Their ideals have 
not been shattered. They are still dreamers. If 
they were not, no amount of money in the world 
could induce them to undergo the strain and stress 
of the modern American business life. But the 
very magnitude and persistence of the problems of 
today and the concentration they require on the 
part of business men, make it seem almost irn- 



142 THE NEW, FRONTIER 

possible for the average man to go home in the 
evening and take the time to view objectively the 
fundamentals of the hfe he is living and set down 
on paper consecutively, and if possible readably, 
an analysis of what he stands for and hopes to 
achieve. 

And yet it is important that the liberal business 
man should make the attempt because the presses 
are busy with literature that misrepresents the ideals 
of the practical man and attacks his accomplish- 
ment. Meanwhile, the public, trained in the be- 
lief that everything which is, is in print, can hardly 
be blamed for coming to the conclusion that the 
leaders of the present business world have little or 
nothing to say for themselves and that everything 
that is said against them is true. 

But those who will not write may at least read 
widely. The reader of books will forget the de- 
tails of what he has read and will go back better 
equipped to his daily problems as a man, to deal 
with men. A new angle here, a suggestion there, 
gathered from the clear thinking of other men who 
have worked for industrial peace, may be a guide- 
post along the road. Any wayfarer on a long 
journey knows that guide-posts do not always 
speak the truth; yet how far should we get without 
them? When we want to make reasonable speed, 
how can we afford to let each traveler evolve a 
guide-book out of his own inner consciousness as 
he goes along? First and foremost we need the 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 143 

human association and practical experience; but 
to supplement this fundamental requirement we 
need contact with the deUberate thoughts and 
conclusions of men which have been gathered to- 
gether from the four quarters of the workaday 
world and placed for our use between the covers 
of books. 



THE NEED FOR FIFTY MILLION 
CAPITALISTS 

As a general proposition, it may be said that 
business men are by training and experience favor- 
ably equipped to take positions of leadership in 
handling the public problems of this age, an age in 
which the organization and management of the 
machinery for producing the basic necessities of 
existence calls not only for the talents of men but, 
to an almost equal degree, for genius. 

First of all, it should be stated frankly that our 
business leaders are capitalists. They are citizens 
of a capitalistic nation. They believe in capitalism. 
And they are by no means preponderantly ultra- 
conservative. Like most groups of Americans they 
include all shades of opinion. Some of our capi- 
talists are radicals. Many are robust conservatives. 
But the majority are liberal. The country as a 
whole often forgets that the principles of capital- 
ism are part of the very bone and sinew of 
America, capable today, as they have always been, 
of the fullest adjustment to the necessities and 
ideals of a great democracy. There cannot be 
capitahst leadership unless there is a great follow- 
ing which believes in capitalism. Let us consider 

the situation here in America. 

144 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 145 

Clear thinking is often obstructed by the fact 
that persons who have objection to the wealth in 
the possession of certain individuals conclude that 
there is something inherently wrong in all private 
possession of wealth. A great many people in at- 
tacking what they are pleased to call capital fail 
to realize that the capital fund of the country is 
drawn from the savings, large and small, of all the 
people. In a broad sense we are a nation of capital- 
ists. It is hard to say how many investors we have 
in the country, but the five Liberty Loan campaigns 
and the War Savings activities have certainly 
created at least twenty-five million investors in 
this country through the medium of the purchase of 
Government securities. It should be noted, how- 
ever, that bondholders are not the only savers in 
a nation. Attention has been called to the fact 
that there were only some four hundred thousand 
bondholders in the entire country previous to the 
war and that this number had been raised to mil- 
lions. This does not give a complete picture of 
American thrift. There are in the United States 
today more than 11,000,000 depositors in savings 
banks, possibly 3,000,000 depositors in savings de- 
partments of banks and trust companies, more than 
11,000,000 holders of insurance poHcies, nearly 
4,000,000 members of building and loan associations 
and perhaps 2,000,000 holders of stocks and bonds 
other than Liberty bonds. 
This does not mean that the capitalist system 



146 THE NEW FRONTIER 

cannot be improved upon in its operating details. 
It does mean that as a nation we are definitely and 
consciously committed to it, that we have ground 
for faith in its ultimate usefulness as a medium of 
general public welfare, and if the capitalistic system 
has a fundamentally sound basis it needs to be ad- 
vocated with the same eloquence, vigor and fair- 
ness that have been used in the advocacy of other 
systems. Winston Churchill recently said in a 
public speech, "I am astonished to see how people 
are afraid to defend the capitalist system. The 
politicians are afraid, the newspapers are afraid, 
and they prefer to give the thing the go-by. As 
a matter of fact, the capitalist system is capable 
of sustained and searching defense. It is the 
only system that has ever been devised for regu- 
lating the economic relations between man and 
man, and for appraising the value of services which 
men render to each other or exact from each other 
— the only system apart from slavery. But if the 
capitalist system is to be successfully defended, it 
can only be defended by showing that there is a 
moral basis for property, and you will not establish 
a moral basis for property or obtain conviction 
from the masses of the people unless you are able 
at the same time to make just laws regulating and 
bringing up to date the condition under which 
property is acquired and enjoyed, and to correct 
by taxation the evils of unmerited acquisition or 
indolent enjoyment," 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 147 

If the economic system of Asia Minor and India 
and China, with its striking absence of capital, and 
the resulting national inactivity and individual lack 
of opportunity, is what Americans want, they may 
perhaps, with great effort, be able to get it. But 
if the capitaHst system is a right system in the 
opinion of a majority of the people of the world, 
it will endure. For the present no substitute has 
been offered which has obtained any standing in 
America. Our object then would fairly appear to 
be to improve that which we have. If the capitalist 
system has virtues, let us strengthen and apply 
them widely. If it has faults, let us aim to eradicate 
them. The American people do not hate capital- 
ism; they all want to be capitalists themselves. 
But they want to see the extremes brought closer 
together. The true economic objective is not to 
destroy capitalism but to spread capital even 
further among the people. American capitalism 
calls for fewer dependents, and fewer fortunes 
which extend beyond the powers and needs 
of individual men. In other words, the great 
public demand today is for the application to 
capital of the sane, middle-of-the-road policy of 
HberaHsm. The chief cure for capitalism is more 
capitalists. 

In any discussion of this matter the simple and 
elementary recognition of the value of the saved 
dollar must take a large place. The solution of 
present economic problems, both our own and those 



148 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of the world, must rest first, upon production, and 
second, upon saving. The capital resources of the 
country which enable the wheels of industry to 
go around are supplied by the miUions of people 
who every year spend at least a dollar less than they 
earn. This dollar may be worth much more than 
a dollar when set to work as a basis for the credit 
operations of the country; but every dollar that 
is saved means at least a dollar more towards 
facilitating the productive powers of the nation. 
During the war we were as a nation converting 
the future savings of our people into current obliga- 
tions to meet the vast expenditures of war. All of 
that money has been spent, but most of it is yet to 
be saved. Somehow or other, every dollar that we 
all know will be raised to fulfil the promise behind 
the Liberty Bonds must actually be earned and 
saved by someone. Every dictate of national com- 
mon sense indicates that the sooner we save this 
money and pay it off the better it will be for us. 
Here is a large task to be visualized in simple terms 
and approached with a view to removing the ex- 
cessive burden of national indebtedness which was 
cheerfully incurred but which must speedily and 
cheerfully be reduced. Certainly, the people as a 
whole ought to be wilHng to provide the moderate 
funds necessary to keep this great fact constantly 
before the country and to increase the tendencies 
toward thrift to a point which will make it possible 
for us to pay off as speedily as possible the debt we 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 149 

have contracted through our Government to our- 
selves. A consumption tax might produce more thrift 
in one year than thrift education in five. But the 
public would not know it as thrift. Forced thrift 
must be supplemented in a democracy with reasons. 

There is a school of thought which is not inclined 
to worry much about national indebtedness, and a 
moderate national debt may have some advantages. 
But when we are confronted with a bonded in- 
debtedness of twenty-five billions of dollars it can- 
not be otherwise than healthy to look back for a 
moment to the happy days w^hen we owed nobody 
anything. For example, the following passage in 
Andrew Jackson's Fifth Annual Message to Congress 
(December 3, 1833) has a very healthy sound. 
"The measures taken by the Secretary of the 
Treasury," said President Jackson, "will probably 
enable him to pay off in the course of the present 
year the residue of the exchanged four and one-half 
per cent stock redeemable on the first of January 
next. . . . The payment of this stock will reduce 
the whole debt of the United States, funded and un- 
funded, to the sum of ^4,760,082.08. 

"From this view of the state of the finances and 
pubHc engagements yet to be filled, you will perceive 
that if Providence permits me to meet you at another 
session I shall have the high gratification of an- 
nouncing to you that the national debt is extin- 
guished. I cannot refrain from expressing the 
pleasure I feel at the near approach of that desirable 



ISO THE NEW FRONTIER 

event. The short period of time within which the 
pubhc debt will have been discharged is strong evi- 
dence of the abundant resources of the country and 
of the prudence and economy with which the Govern' 
ment has heretofore been administered. We have 
waged two wars since we became a nation, with 
one of the most powerful kingdoms in the world, 
both of them undertaken in defense of our dearest 
rights, both successfully prosecuted and honorably 
terminated; and many of those who partook in 
the first struggle as well as in the second will have 
lived to see the last item of the debt incurred in 
these necessary but expensive conflicts faithfully and 
honestly discharged, and we shall have the proud 
satisfaction of bequeathing to the public servants 
who follow us in the administration of the Govern- 
ment, the rare blessing of a revenue sufficiently 
abundant^ raised without injustice or oppression to 
our citizens, and unencumbered with any burdens 
but what they themselves shall think proper to 
impose upon it." 

In his Seventh Annual Message (December 7, 
1835) Jackson used the following language: "Since 
my last annual communication all the remains of 
the public debt have been redeemed, or money has 
been placed on deposit for this purpose whenever 
the creditors choose to receive it. All the other 
pecuniary engagements of the Government have 
been honorably and promptly fulfilled and there will 
be a balance in the Treasury at the close of the 
present year of about $19,000,000." 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 151 

This language is not quoted to break the hearts 
of those who are at present in charge of our national 
Treasury. It may truly be said that this nation 
has been most fortunate in the men who have been 
responsible for our public finances during the 
stupendous financial years of the war. There are 
some serious differences of opinion with regard to 
rates of interest and other phases of our financial 
program; but history will probably conclude that 
the secretaries and assistant secretaries of the 
Treasury who bore this heavy burden rendered a 
great public service. And it may be added here 
that there has never been in the history of the 
country a more stimulating example of complete 
popular cooperation in a great nation than was 
evinced under the leadership of the Treasury De- 
partment and the Federal Reserve Banks which all 
through the war turned to the men who possessed 
the requisite knowledge, irrespective of party or 
of the fact that these men happened to be in Wall 
Street or State Street or on a farm in Kansas. 
They balanced conflicting opinions and formed their 
conclusions without prejudices or favor and the re- 
sult was a series of financial operations which in 
cleanness and magnitude has never been surpassed 
in the history of the world. 

If war debts are to be paid off it is evident that 
the impulses toward thrift must be emphasized. 
But the experience of the War Savings campaign 
taught us that thrift teaching today must be in 



152 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the language of today. We are not living in a time 
when thrift in the abstract is appealing. The old 
maxims "A pin a day is a groat a year" and "A 
penny saved is a penny earned" do not touch the 
enthusiasm of the present generation which has 
been brought up under the shadow of great enter- 
prises, and transactions on a continental scale. 
The underlying necessity for thrift is greater than 
it ever was, and our solution of the diificulty is 
to use the vivid and colorful advertising and pub- 
licity machinery of the country to lay before the 
public not the negative processes of thrift but the 
positive and highly enjoyable results thereof. This 
principle is well illustrated by the method by which 
the War Savings movement has firmly established 
thrift teaching in the schools. It will never do any 
good to tell a child to save his pennies simply in 
order to become a better child. The urge of the 
stick of candy is so much more powerful than the 
abstract moral urge that such a practice must 
ordinarily be futile. But suppose we give the child 
a picture of a bicycle, and proceed to whet the 
desire by dwelling at considerable length upon the 
delights of bicycling and describing a series of 
bicycle journeys to points of interest and pleasure 
beyond walking distance from the school. Or sup- 
pose we visualize a trip to Japan with pictures of 
Japanese scenes and Japanese children. After this 
we bring into the schoolroom a picture of the ship 
that goes to Japan, with illustrations of the cabins 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 153 

and dining salon and all the interesting features of 
the great ocean liner. Add to this a canceled 
steamship ticket, and finally refer to the price of 
the journey and the number of Thrift Stamps and 
War Savings Stamps which will make up the neces- 
sary total and we have perhaps developed a new 
saver in America and at the same time added to the 
happiness of the child. Of course this method can 
be extended so as to apply to all ages and to different 
objectives such as putting a boy through college or 
setting him up in business, or putting him in a 
position where he can afford to get married. This 
is positive rather than negative thrift teaching. 

Again, we must lay emphasis upon earning power 
as well as upon saving. It may be pointed out that 
the young man who earns $1500 a year may save 
too much if he saves at the expense of his personal 
appearance or the personal appearance of his wife 
and family. Some men at the present time may 
well find that by saving a little less and spending 
a little more in a judicious way they will increase 
their chances of advancement, and as earning 
power increases saving power will increase. Thus 
by spending a little more and saving a little less 
the man to whom saving has become an obsession 
will find that he can spend much more and save 
much more, to the great good of the economic 
community. 

All thrift teaching should be positive and not 
negative. It will not be productive to say "don't'* 



154 THE NEW FRONTIER 

to people; but rather "do." Thrift is stored-up 
power; refraining from purely wasteful and un- 
productive expenditures today will make available 
to the individual money for expenditures tomorrow 
and for next year which will be far more productive 
in the way of personal welfare. We should be pre- 
pared to place this appeal before the public on the 
fundamental ground of the joy it will bring. We 
must take thrift out of the class of those moral 
texts which are universally used and never followed, 
and bring it up to the practical level of the man 
who sits on the bleachers at the ball game and likes 
saving because it works. We can go squarely back 
to Jefferson's words In the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence that every man is entitled to "life, Hberty 
and the pursuit of happiness." The pursuit of 
happiness is legitimate and inevitable. The ap- 
plication of happiness, however, which is pertinent 
in this case is not "let us eat and drink for tomorrow 
we die" but rather, "let us enjoy ourselves within 
reason today and not spend all we earn, for tomorrow 
we shall still be living and we shall need the money.'* 
There is a wide national significance in this kind 
of thrift teaching, because it emphasizes the fact 
that a nation can be strong only if it is made up 
of strong individuals. It emphasizes the necessity 
of dissemination of capital in small units throughout 
the population. It emphasizes the value of saving 
in tying our foreign population more firmly to the 
soil and helping them to become self-reliant Ameri- 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 155 

cans. It thus tends to produce a nation of vigor- 
ous and contented people, and through it a wise 
liberal leadership can throw humanity and sunlight 
into a dull subject and thus set in motion a force 
which will in turn throw sunhght into some of the 
darkest corners of the social structure of America. 
Liberal leadership must aim at a constantly ex- 
panding development of production and thrift. 
The national motto may well be "work and save." 

If capitalism is to be adapted to the expanding 
needs of our own time its exponents must not 
simply favor it — they must understand it. They 
must not rest content to assert that it Is sound — 
they must be prepared to prove it. This means that 
business leadership calls more and more for a 
thorough training in the principles of economics. 
The economics of the fathers has still its great 
lessons; but it must be read in the light of the 
modern development of applied economics, in a 
day when the problems of finance and industry 
are so numerous and varied as to be out of the mental 
grasp of any single human being. 

Like Moliere's doctor, who suddenly discovered 
that he had been talking "prose" for thirty years, 
the average business man might well say that in 
the discussion of current questions he has for years 
actually been talking economics. One of the 
achievements of the past generation has been the 
bringing of economic theory down from the clouds, 
as Franklin brought lightning out of the sky, and 



IS6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

applying its principles to practical affairs, with 
the beneficent result of limiting to some extent the 
Utopian tendencies of the abstract thinker on the 
one hand, and on the other, of helping the practical 
man to achieve a little order out of the chaos of 
economic and social action and reaction which 
besets his daily life. 

Sometimes even a single clear thinker can ac- 
complish a little. For example, the modern volume 
by Henry Clay entitled ** Economics for the General 
Reader" which was described in a recent issue of 
the American Economic Review as "The best small 
volume on general economics that has appeared in 
this decade" makes one feel that a way through the 
maze of industrial conflict can be found, just as 
American pioneers, in spite of endless hardships, 
found their way over the Alleghanies to the great 
empire of the West. Mr. Clay is not one of those 
who believe that the elements of human nature 
and human aspirations are not a part of economics. 
He does not believe that people will do what is 
reasonable without assistance. On the contrary, 
he believes that a study of all laws that apply to 
human nature must be brought into sympathetic 
relationship before we can eliminate the amount 
of unrest which upsets the productive equilibrium 
necessary to keep this world of hundreds of mil- 
lions of people in reasonable happiness. 

He lays great stress upon a broader definition of 
capital. Production alone is not the test. "Now 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 157 

if we treat product alone as wealth and arrogate 
the term wealth, which in a broad sense means any- 
thing that satisfies a want, to product, which covers 
only external sources of satisfaction, inevitably we 
suggest that the internal sources of satisfaction are 
not wealth; we give materialistic tendency to our 
aims and values. This the present economic system 
does, because it is based on this narrow conception 
of wealth. 

"This superficial definiteness gives economic 
values an advantage when they come into conflict 
with other valuations as the influence of an idea of 
conduct depends very largely on its sharpness of 
outline. ... In expenditure on education, for ex- 
ample, the appeal of technical education is nearly 
always more forcible than the appeal of hberal 
education, because the results of the former can be 
stated in the addition of so many dollars a year to 
the earning capacity of the student or the addition 
of so many dollars in value to the trade of the town 
• — while the latter merely makes better men and 
women. The present age might be the richest of 
all the ages in welfare as it is the richest in wealth. 
Perhaps it is; if it is not, it is because it has mis- 
taken the means for the end, and treated the in- 
crease of wealth as an end in itself, instead of 
controlling it and directing it in accordance with 
its general conception of welfare." 

That wealth is an empty term if it does not in- 
clude a due regard for the conditions of mind and 



158 THE NEW FRONTIER 

body under which the wealth is produced is becom- 
ing axiomatic in America. But we are still far from 
the time when our liberal leaders may be said, as 
a group, to have mastered the economic elements of 
the great problems which confront us. Most busi- 
ness men speak the language of economics. Their 
success or failure affords living proof of the existence 
of inexorable economic laws. Just a little time 
given to study, to analysis, to the simplest co- 
ordination of their own experience will often place 
them in a position to help us on the way towards 
economic sanity. The trouble has been that these 
men have been too busy acting economics to afford 
time to think economics. We have now reached a 
point when the vast world machinery of production 
and distribution calls for experienced men who have 
drawn true lessons from the work of a lifetime, and 
are capable of letting their light shine before men 
so they may be led towards the paths of peace and 
justice and prosperity. 

There is much unsound economics abroad in the 
world. Happily business leadership has begun to 
recognize the value of cooperation between the 
colleges and business. Many great banks and cor- 
porations have drafted students of economics from 
the universities. There are certainly a hundred 
former professors of economics now connected with 
American business life. An interesting example of 
reciprocity in this field was recently seen in the 
selection, as the head of the Harvard School of 



FIFTY MILLION CAPITALISTS 159 

Business Administration, of Dean Donham, who had 
been for a dozen years an officer of a great trust 
company. Such cooperation is bound to raise the 
standards of American business hfe. Such con- 
tacts cannot fail to equip capitaHst leaders to meet 
any demands which the new world may make upon 
them. 

Such contacts may help to teach mankind that 
there is no solution of present ills except pro- 
ducing more and consuming less. The waste of 
war cannot be paid for by printing-press money. 
There is and can be only one answer to the pres- 
ent international financial difficulties, namely, an 
increase in production and an increase in saving 
on the part of the people of every country of the 
world. This necessity cannot be obviated by any 
economic scheme which human ingenuity can devise. 
In proportion as the world shall work and save, 
produce more exportable goods and reduce paper 
currency, just in that proportion can budgets be 
equalized and inflation reduced. While a fuller co- 
ordination of Europe's resources would increase her 
economic strength and financial credit, yet without 
an increase in production and saving, and the prod- 
ucts of such effort, we cannot hope for a betterment 
of the present exchange situation. This remedy is 
at the present time simple and unspectacular. And 
it will be applied exactly insofar as human beings 
are wilHng to assume the burdens and undertake 
the sacrifices which underlie all human progress. 



AN AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 

The work of running a modern nation is a 
matter of business, and, indeed, big business. It 
may be possible to show that neither the business 
leaders nor the public realize how fully the economic 
developments of the past decade have forced upon 
governments everywhere a great variety of in- 
dustrial, commercial and financial problems. 
Public servants without previous business training 
have had to rely increasingly upon practical mer- 
chants and bankers. Governments have largely 
ceased to regard great business executives as un- 
desirable citizens, because the heads of govern- 
ment must have the help of these men or fail in the 
discharge of their heavy public responsibilities. 

President Wilson perhaps slightly over-stated the 
case in his speech in Turin, Italy, in January, 
1919, when he said: 

*'The plans of the modern world are made in the 
counting house. The men that do the business of 
the world now shape the destinies of the world, and 
peace or war is now in a large measure in the hands 
of those who conduct the commerce of the world." 

This statement is impressive when one considers 
that its author has had in the past decade an al- 

160 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS i6i 

most unequaled opportunity to observe and weigh 
the elements which comprise our modern world; 
and it is particularly significant in view of the fact 
that Mr. Wilson has never been inclined to give 
more than a fair share of consideration to the views 
of business. 

The war has left to the world problems of such 
variety and magnitude as to require more of the 
kind of leadership which may rightly be expected 
of business men. The demand for leadership is as 
old as the human race. If all men were placed 
on an equal plane on Monday, the great ma- 
jority would be lined up behind a few leaders 
by Saturday. 

The mob rule tendency all over the world today 
is not due to the failure of the principle of leader- 
ship, but to a failure in the quahty of leadership. 
The Bolsheviki are working in an atmosphere where 
leadership was characterized for centuries by every 
vice which leadership can assume — autocracy, 
cruelty and injustice. Because kaisers, czars and 
princes abused the power which came to them, 
people in Russia and elsewhere came to beHeve that 
leadership was a failure. But inevitably leadership 
must emerge from mob rule. In America up to this 
time we have been very fortunate. In the words 
of Theodore Roosevelt: "Thanks to the teaching 
and the practice of men whom we must revere as 
leaders, of the men hke Washington and Lincoln, 
we have hitherto escaped the twin gulfs of despot- 



i62 THE NEW FRONTIER 

ism and mob rule." This "middle-of-the-road" 
policy is not easy to determine. In fact it calls for 
a keener sort of leadership than is necessary to win 
men and women to the enthusiastic support of 
brilliant subversive doctrines. Radical leadership 
is at the present time more conscious and popular 
than at any time in our history. 

A sense of responsibility for leadership is the 
highest product of any system of education and 
sound public leadership is the most difficult of all. 
Business men as a class have certainly not sought 
to take a predominant part in pubhc affairs. Busi- 
ness success usually carries with it an implication 
of conservatism, a careful attention to work and 
to the needs of clients and customers. This carries 
with it a natural hesitation to undertake new 
burdens and an instinctive reluctance to become 
conspicuous in controversial matters. 

It is a sound tendency. No sane liberal would 
advocate turning the world of business into a caucus 
or a perpetual convention. At the same time is it 
fair to ask how the common interest of the people, 
which includes obviously the interest of the leaders 
of business and their clients, can properly be sub- 
served if this great group of trained and experienced 
men do not contribute largely to meeting It? If 
pubhc matters are to be left to untrained and un- 
experienced men exclusively, can we consistently 
complain If pubhc business is badly managed? 

This chapter does not advocate any sudden entry 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 163 

of business men into the public forum. It does 
advocate a gradual, consistent increase in the 
thought and time, not inconsistent with their busi- 
ness necessities, which successful men may be willing 
to give to the common interests and problems of 
the nation. There have been, at all periods of our 
history, business men who have given liberally of 
their time, strength and money to public causes. 
But the nation has not at its command today so 
much of this powerful resource as is demanded by 
the essentially business problems which occupy the 
Government. All the service business men can 
possibly find time to render is called for in the 
present situation. 

It should not be lost sight of that there have been 
very good reasons why this participation has not 
been more extensive. The reasons are, first, that 
American business men have been deeply devoted 
to their own work. They have learned the value 
of concentration. They have done a century's 
work in the past generation. Second, as a conse- 
quence of this absorption they have actually not 
had time to give much thought to national prob- 
lems, or to read widely, or to engage in conferences 
that laid bare the roots of things, as distinguished 
from conventions and banquets that played bright 
colors over the surfaces of great issues. Third, 
those men who have felt a personal responsibility 
for betterment of conditions have lacked ability or 
inclination to get together. As a result, instead of 



i64 THE NEW FRONTIER 

perfecting cooperative organizations of ability in 
which common effort would submerge jealousies 
and check personal hobbies in the interest of care- 
fully thought-out plans, we have had a succession 
of purely personal utterances on economics and 
business from isolated individuals. Their speeches 
and pamphlets have been interesting. They have 
attracted attention in the press. But compared 
with the highly organized efforts of the radicals 
they have been ineffectual. 

What we need today is an American Federation 
of Brains. We need a working organization of 
leaders in all lines of activity, including labor as 
well as capital, to get at the heart of current ques- 
tions, and to make use of the great publicity ma- 
chinery of the country to place its conclusions before 
the people. Individualism, which is at the basis of 
much of the success and inspiration which underlies 
American achievement, is not the prime factor in 
shaping a national industrial policy. The thought 
and inspiration of individual thinkers, radical and 
conservative, is the raw material of a working policy. 
But without the machinery of constant study, 
analysis, conference, thinking aloud, compromise, 
tabulation and public presentation, the raw material 
produced with so much labor will, so far as public 
benefit is concerned, disintegrate. 

Another important aspect of the situation is that 
many business men feel the need for greater co- 
operation on the part of trained and successful men 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 165 

in all fields. We have grown so big in our modern 
city life that we cannot get together and know each 
other without the same kind of definite and careful 
work which characterizes the highly efficient or- 
ganizations we have developed in the fields of labor 
or politics or business. We don't know who our 
leaders are. A man came to New York from the 
West not long ago and asked the manager of a 
leading hotel, "Who are your great preachers?" 
He received no answer. There is an answer, and 
we should see to it that the answer is more generally 
known, just as we should have an answer to the 
question as to the identity of our great actors, 
architects, editors and doctors, whose names are 
not familiar to the majority of men, women and 
children who can tell with surprising accuracy the 
names of our leading automobiles or shaving soaps. 
There is too little face-to-face exchange of ideas 
on the part of successful men in widely differing 
fields of activity. Men see too much of associates 
in their own limited line of business. To get any 
community of action it is considered necessary to 
raise a substantial sum of money and send a series 
of pamphlets and letters to a group of people who 
often live within a radius of ten miles of each other. 
Business men and bankers, partly because as a 
group they have more executive experience, more 
surplus funds or a greater willingness to apply 
such funds to public interests, have come to be 
looked upon as the prime movers in starting any 



i66 THE NEW FRONTIER 

project tending to influence public opinion. Men 
and women not in the business or financial world 
should be called upon far more than at present 
for leadership in such undertakings. Business men 
should be joined by clergymen, editors, engineers, 
artists, college professors, and physicians, and other 
sound, clear thinking citizens with a wide range 
of experience, all combining to produce that result 
which is the liberal American attitude. 

Business men, simply because they are conspicu- 
ously successful in one line are readily assumed to 
be omniscient. Locke, in one of his essays on edu- 
cation remarks, "The mistake is, that he that is 
found reasonable in one thing is concluded to be 
so in all, and to think or say otherwise is thought 
so august an affront and so senseless a censure, 
that nobody ventures to do it." 

We certainly know by this time that the man 
who has made a great fortune in the manufacture 
of telescopes or carpets ought not to be considered 
a final and conclusive authority on questions of 
politics, sociology, and art. Contact with success- 
ful business men brings out the fact that they 
would be delighted to be relieved of some of the 
tremendous pressure which is put upon them to 
express views upon subjects of which they know 
little and to take the lead in a variety of movements 
of a public character, simply because no one else 
can be found who is willing to do the work or pro- 
vide the money. Mr. Taft is quoted as saying to a 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 167 

group he was addressing in a small middle Western 
city that over a period of a dozen years he had 
been there four or five times to advocate as 
many pubHc-spirited measures, and each time he 
met the same thirteen men. 

The full value of a wider cooperation was 
brought home to many thousands of people during 
the war when a united nation achieved an unprec- 
edented result on the basis of universal association 
for an unselfish ideal. Local committees repre- 
sentative of the various communities throughout 
the nation brought the combined intelligence and 
influence of all phases of Americanism to bear on 
a great purpose, and achieved it efficiently and 
speedily. It would be a great tragedy if httle 
personal problems crowd out of our minds the 
splendid lesson which came to us during the war, 
of the results to be obtained by the whole-hearted 
cooperation of a great people. This ideal is no 
longer to be regarded as an experiment but as a 
practical measure which was proved to be workable. 

Let us spread the responsibility of leadership. 
But after we have broadened the base upon which 
leadership rests it is still inevitable that business 
and financial men will take a prominent part in 
the affairs of this country, because this group is 
recruited by a process of selection and competition 
from among the^soundest and most energetic ele- 
ments in every community throughout the nation. 

If it is true that "the men who do the business 



i68 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of the world now shape the destinies of the world," 
it is of the greatest importance for the nation to 
take stock of its business men. Inasmuch as the 
business community of Wall Street is so prominent 
in the business world of America, it is of importance 
for Americans to know something of what Wall 
Street is, what the community stands for. 

In this discussion much that will be said of Wall 
Street men applies equally to men of business and 
bankers the country over. A discussion of some of 
the phases of the life of this particular community 
will serve to bring out the obstacles which have 
been in the way of a fuller realization by business 
men everywhere of their ideals of public service. 

Wall Street is today the great Mecca of trained 
men from all over America. This vast industrial 
and financial clearing house of the Nation affords 
irresistibly attractive motives for ambition and 
achievement. And the predominant motive today 
is not money — but rather the absorbing fascina- 
tion of the day's work, the love of the game. It is 
important from all points of view that the country 
should understand this. One reason why it is im- 
portant is because the welfare of a tremendous 
number of people is affected by the transactions 
which center in this part of New York City. The 
work of Wall Street touches intimately the life and 
happiness of the average man and woman, for on 
many important subjects, as New York thinks so 
thinks the country. Scores of movements of great 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 169 

national importance originate in Wall Street; and 
while many of them succeed, many of them are 
hampered simply because the men who guide them 
are connected with the financial life of America. 

It may be of interest to glance briefly at the 
physical features of the little understood Wall 
Street district. Tradition has it that in 1644 
William Kieft, Governor of New Amsterdam, caused 
a wall to be erected at the north end of the little 
settlement to shut in a small section at the southern 
end of Manhattan Island for the purpose of pre- 
venting the straying of cattle and to aff'ord protec- 
tion to the inhabitants against Indian attacks. 
The erection of this barrier practically determined 
the location of Wall Street, for in 1653 when Peter 
Stuyvesant erected a stockade to defend the city 
from the British, a strip of ground forty to fifty 
feet below the cattle guard was selected for the new 
wall which was then built on the line of the present 
Wall Street. At the close of the Seventeenth 
Century the wall was torn down because it had 
outgrown its usefulness and involved an expensive 
upkeep. The stones were used for the foundation 
of the new City Hall which was erected at the 
corner of Wall and Nassau Streets. 

From this time forward Wall Street was the center 
of the public and social life of the city. On July 
16, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was 
read from the steps of the City Hall. At the close 
of the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton 



lyo THE NEW FRONTIER 

and Aaron Burr moved to New York, Hamilton 
opening an office at 58 (now 33) Wall Street. Burr 
lived at 10 Little Queen (now Cedar) Street, part 
of the present site of the National Bank of Com- 
merce Building. In 1784 the Continental Congress 
expressed its desire to establish headquarters in 
New York and the City Hall was placed at its dis- 
posal. The following year all the representatives 
of the national, state and municipal authority were 
located in Wall Street and a center of interest was 
established which determined the location of im- 
portant business and financial houses, thus estab- 
lishing a tradition which has prevailed up to the 
present time. 

In 1788 the City Hall was rebuilt and enlarged, 
and the new structure on the same site, completed 
in the following year, was called Federal Hall. On 
April 6, 1789, a canvass of the electoral vote taken 
in Federal Hall resulted in the unanimous election 
of George Washington as the first President of the 
United States, and on April 30 of the same year 
Washington was inaugurated there. Federal Hall 
remained the seat of the Government until in 1790 
headquarters were transferred to Philadelphia. 

Gradually the growth of business drove the resi- 
dential district to the northward and by 1830 
Federal Hall had disappeared and Wall Street had 
become no longer a residential street but was en- 
tirely transformed for the purposes of business 
which very soon spread over the neighboring section 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 171 

north, south and west, until today when one speaks 
of Wall Street, or simply ''The Street," the district 
is referred to which may be roughly defined as in- 
cluding Broadway from the headquarters of the 
Standard Oil Company, at No. 26 Broadway, for an 
indefinite distance of several blocks, lined on both 
sides with a variety of banks and office buildings, 
running north to Maiden Lane or beyond. The sec- 
tion includes Wall Street itself from Trinity Church 
east as far as Pearl Street, together with many of the 
streets which run north and south from Wall Street. 
It covers approximately twenty-five blocks with an 
area of thirty-five acres. 

This district includes the largest and tallest office 
buildings in the world which have grown up in 
response to the demands of a working population 
and a transient customer population of approxi- 
mately 1,000,000 people whose convenience demands 
a centralized location of the facihties necessary in 
the transaction of a substantial proportion of a great 
nation's financial business. Among these office 
buildings is the Equitable, forty stories high, whose 
sixty-one elevators transport nearly 100,000 persons 
daily. Nearby, practically unchanged in its ap- 
pearance since the early days of the city, is Trinity 
Church, with its churchyard in which are buried 
many men intimately connected with the history of 
the state and nation, including Alexander Hamilton 
and Robert Fulton. Across the street from Trinity 
Church is the First National Bank Building, located 



172 THE NEW FRONTIER 

on a small half lot, which is probably the most 
valuable piece of property in New York, having 
cost approximately $525 a square foot. 

From a broader standpoint Wall Street is the 
principal center of the credit and other financial 
operations of the nation, and of the world. Within 
this radius are located thirty-five of the largest 
national banks and trust companies of the country, — 
organizations which reported in September, 1919, a 
combined capital, surplus and undivided profits of 
$583,875,2CX) and deposits of ^5,464,413,000. These 
institutions supply a very large part of the credit 
for the basic industries which maintain the life and 
make possible the comfortable existence of the 
population of the country. Here, too, are the various 
markets which provide for the exchange of securities 
representing the great industries of the nation, and 
the principal commodity markets. So many billions 
of dollars change hands in a day to pay for the vast 
exchanges which must take place to feed and clothe 
and transport our population that the big banks 
must be near one another and within reasonable 
distance of the Clearing House, and the Federal 
Reserve Bank. 

What do these banks do? They supply the life 
blood for the transaction of essential business and 
with various shifts of workers are practically never 
closed day or night, year after year. A great com- 
mercial bank is simply one phase of the far-flung 
commerce of America. Its function is the accumula- 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 173 

tion of a reservoir of credit, and the direction of this 
credit into those channels where it is needed in order 
that the business of the country may be facihtated. 
This credit, ultimately based on gold, constitutes an 
order on a portion of the actual physical wealth of 
the country; that is, on its raw materials, its ma- 
chinery, its labor and other agencies for the produc- 
tion of goods. 

Thus, a farmer in Iowa sells his crops in the 
Autumn, receiving his pay in the form of a check 
on his local bank. He does not cash it but deposits 
it; that is, a credit is established to his account in 
his bank. The amount is above his current needs, 
and his bank, by deposit in a New York bank, 
establishes for its use and that of its customers a 
New York credit. Later on, the New York bank is 
called upon to finance a shipment of rubber from 
Singapore, in order that an American rubber manu- 
facturer may maintain his supply of raw material and 
thus be enabled to make tires for his next season's 
requirements. It is enabled to do so by utilizing 
the accumulations of credit from widely scattered 
sources, among them the Iowa farmer's original 
deposit, and the distant farmer, by the marvelous 
organization of American credit, made possible by 
the commercial banks of Wall Street and other 
financial centers, has thus been able to assist in 
financing the shipment of the rubber which must 
reach this country months in advance of this very 
farmer's demand for tires. 



174 THE NEW FRONTIER 

The groups of men whose business it is to supply 
credit to productive industries are just as essential 
to the industry of any nation or community as is 
the coal to a locomotive. 

What else does Wall Street do? For one thing it 
provides in the Stock Exchange a market for se- 
curities. It is impossible for a new concern, whose 
credit is not established, to go to a bank and procure 
the money with which to put to the test the skill 
of the management and the working force, and the 
question as to whether or not the pubhc will buy 
the output of their plant. In such a case the surplus 
funds of individuals must be called into play and 
consequently the company's bonds and stocks are 
offered for public sale. The Stock Exchange affords 
a centralized meeting place for funds which are 
available for such investment or speculation, and 
performs a service for hundreds of small companies, 
which could not function without drawing on the 
available investment funds of the country, the same 
service which the Liberty Loan campaigns performed 
for the Government on a vast scale in time of war. 
The Stock Exchange is managed by a Board of 
Governors. They do not guarantee that every group 
of business men who get together will earn large 
profits and thus be able to pay interest on their 
bonds and dividends on their stock. They do in- 
vestigate each company carefully, however, and see 
to it that the securities offered to the public actually 
represent what they are held out as representing. 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 175 

The individual judgment of the man or woman who 
buys this stock will always have to be called upon. 
The investor who does not want to confine surplus 
funds to Government securities paying a moderate 
rate of interest must take the chances which always 
go with ventures dependent upon human judgment 
and the changing conditions of economic life in a 
great nation; and the chances they take with their 
money will be compensated, in proportion to the 
supply of money available, at rates commensurate 
with the risk taken, and with the chances of success 
of the venture. 

The Stock Exchange is the nation's chief market, 
not for actual goods and merchandise, but for se- 
curities issued by business men in every state in the 
Union representing the production, manufacture, 
transportation, distribution or sale of raw materials 
and finished products amounting in value to possibly 
one-fifth of the total material wealth of the United 
States. The great fairs of the early economic 
development of the world called for the periodic 
assembling of furs, or cloths, or foodstuffs, or 
whatever the industry of men and women within 
the range of a few hundred miles might produce. 
The market of today facilitates the continuous ex- 
change of the products of an entire nation, in endless 
variety. 

The element of speculation is a large one. We 
may feel that the purely speculative features of the 
stock markets are abused; but the tendency toward 



176 THE NEW FRONTIER 

speculation cannot be done away with until human 
nature itself is abolished. The time will never come 
when honest men will cease to dream dreams of 
sudden fortunes. And the day will never arrive 
when men and women will cease to venture their 
money on the stimulus of these dreams, nor when 
they will cease to complain of others if they them- 
selves are unsuccessful. There is one absolutely 
sure prescription for avoiding loss of money in 
speculation, and only one; namely, don't speculate. 
So long as great ventures require the risking of 
money, so long must groups of men of vision and 
daring, entrepreneurs, be called upon to survey new 
fields and risk fortunes in the interest of progress. 
When these ventures are in their infancy they must 
not be permitted to get into the hands of small in- 
vestors. They call for the surplus that men and 
women can afford to lose. These ventures must be 
kept clean; the standard of intelligence and technical 
skill applied to the analysis of new ventures must be 
constantly improved. But as to abohshing the se- 
curities market itself, we might as well advocate 
abolishing railroads because transportation by coach 
and four was healthier and more soothing to the 
nerves. 

In addition to this principal market for securities, 
there is a group of men who deal in a class of stocks 
which is less established and well known. These 
are the so-called "unlisted" securities. From time 
to time they arrive at a state of stability which 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 177 

justifies their listing on the Stock Exchange. Many 
of them represent highly useful undertakings. Some 
of them represent the production of gold, which is 
the basis of our currency system. Others simply 
represent the belief or the hope that a certain article 
is the one thing that every American family will 
want to have in its home. There is a very dramatic 
element to the periodic offering of this class of stocks 
and the occasional brilliant success of one, while 
hundreds are failing. As long as they stand for 
actual values or represent an honest belief that 
values will accrue, and are put out without mis- 
representation, they are economically sound. 

Broadly speaking, however, it is the duty of the 
leaders of business, to confine speculation in every 
possible way to the people who can afford to specu- 
late, and to conduct an unceasing campaign of edu- 
cation, so that the widow and orphan who should be 
investing in Liberty Bonds or other unquestionable 
securities, and receiving a certain income of from 
four to seven per cent are not induced by a statement 
of half-truths to risk capital on a prospect of fabulous 
returns. Such persons cannot afford to take such 
risks and it is a false condition which permits them 
to be led to the point of indulging in such ventures. 
The leaders of opinion in Wall Street are a unit in 
opposing this tendency, but they w^ill always be 
blamed for the unhappy results which are of daily 
occurrence, until they exercise their public responsi- 
bility of leadership in the nation by making clear 



178 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the principles underlying investment and speculation 
to everyone who has a dollar to invest. 

Large financial transactions have always excited 
the imagination. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily 
the most scrupulous people who are most easily 
moved by the ambition to acquire a substantial 
fortune without doing any work, and consequently 
we always have with us in Wall Street a few human 
parasites lurking around the edges of honesty, at- 
tempting to make a shady deal here and a crooked 
trade there, preferring this kind of life with its 
occasional affluent days and its accompanying excite- 
ment to any legitimate occupation. These men al- 
most inevitably end their lives without a dollar, 
in jail or out of jail. But the men who pay the rent 
on banking properties or office buildings in the lower 
end of Manhattan can no more prevent dishonestly 
inclined people renting office space in their neighbor- 
hood than can Mr. Frohman or Mr. Belasco prevent 
undesirable elements from existing in the midst of 
legitimate and highly artistic achievements in the 
vicinity of Broadway and Forty-second Street, or 
than the city authorities can prevent the good 
name of New York being tarnished by wrong-doing 
in any part of the city. 

Dishonest traders and operators sooner or later 
reveal their true character and are forced to pay the 
penalty of their crimes, to the accompaniment of 
extensive publicity in the newspapers. But this 
publicity as a rule does not enable the general public 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 179 

to distinguish between the occasional frauds and the 
vast bulk of business in the financial section which is 
transacted not only according to law but according 
to the best ethics of American business life. It is 
time that this majority had more to say for itself. 
The leaders of the banking and financial community 
in the United States can only stand or fall on the 
basis first of their service to the public and a fair 
recompense for that service, and second, the fullest 
public understanding of that service, and com- 
plete public recognition of its economic value and 
importance. 

From the standpoint of truth-telling the American 
system of financial credit analysis is one of the most 
wonderful structures ever built up in the progress 
of the world. Its sources of information, its accuracy, 
its far-reaching tentacles form the elements for a 
dramatic and fascinating story. Compared with it 
the German Secret Service and propaganda organiza- 
tion was puerile. What is wanted here is the truth — 
the truth about human beings clever and stupid, 
subtle and obvious, honest and dishonest. It is 
truth raw and unadulterated, without undue regard 
for sentiment or past successes or the happy dreams 
of profits which fill the minds of men. This vast 
system, Argus-eyed, reliable, is the rock upon which 
credit is built. It is the foundation which enables 
billions of dollars worth of goods to pass and repass 
with the use of scarcely a dollar in gold. It is the 
white light of fact in which the slightest blemish on 



i8o THE NEW FRONTIER 

the good name of an individual is brought out in 
sharp rehef. It is the new world of business and 
commerce, which has taken the place of barter and 
cash dealing, the commerce built upon credit in the 
good faith of men. And on this firm basis rests the 
vast structure of agriculture, mining, manufacture, 
transportation, and salesmanship, the production and 
delivery to the ultimate consumer of all the neces- 
saries of life. 

Wall Street men, trained in this rigid school, or 
subject to its dominion, are equipped with an element 
of character which goes to the root of public re- 
sponsibility. They cannot afford to have American 
business used as a political foot-ball. America as a 
whole cannot afford it. Little good it will do the 
people of America to live under the traditions of 
democracy if the machinery of business, which is 
the basis of their existence, is under suspicion. Let 
them study the standards of business men. If they 
prove to be sound let them rally to their support. 
Let them hold business leaders to strict account- 
bility as they hold their other servants in public 
office to strict accountability. But let both be 
assumed to be fair and honorable until proved 
otherwise. 

An incident which occurred in the early months 
of the war is typical of the kind of unfairness 
which does great harm. A public official in a 
speech in the West accused a ring of New York 
financiers of interfering for private gain with the 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS i8i 

public financing of the Government. Happily a 
leader in local affairs had the courage and ability 
to meet the charge squarely. He wired the public 
official as follows: 

A New York newspaper this morning reports 
that in an interview yesterday you stated that 
"a ring of New York financiers is hampering 
the Government in its Liberty Loan campaign, 
endeavoring to make it a partial failure so that 
the next Loan will bear a higher rate of interest. 
These men are the spiritual descendants of the 
ring that operated in just such an emergency 
during the Civil War, and by their methods 
forced the price of war bonds to 40 and 50, 
and one day to 39. It is the duty of every 
citizen to make this Loan a success in spite of 
these New York traitors." Please telegraph 
advising me whether you are correctly quoted 
as above, either literally or in substance. 

The public official replied stating in substance 
that he had withdrawn his charges. His letter, 
however, contained these significant phrases: 

On the 13th in an editorial entitled "How 
Wall Street Goes to War," a New York news- 
paper said: "In ordinary times Stock Exchange 
sentiment is not easy to gauge. Today, how- 
ever, he who runs may read. It is against the 
United States." This paper is published under 
your nose. I take it for granted that you read 
these editorials in this newspaper. The people 
out West read them, I among the rest, and it 
was not a very violent conclusion, as it is sup- 



i82 THE NEW FRONTIER 

posed to be one of the great and leading lights 
in the newspaper realm, that the paper knew 
what it was talking about. 

The charges were withdrawn. But they had been 
made pubhcly, and were widely quoted throughout 
the nation. In this case the pubHc official must 
have known that the fact that Liberty Bonds ^'^re 
selling below par on the Stock Exchange simply 
meant that the price quoted was the price the 
American people as a whole were willing to pay for 
these securities in the open market at that time. 
The supply was greater than the demand. He also 
knew that if this market had not been available 
many thousands of patriotic firms and individuals 
who have sudden needs for funds to conduct their 
business and must have a ready market would not 
have been able to buy bonds at all. Without the 
facihties of the Stock Exchange the Government 
could not have conducted its financial operations 
as it did. By way of partly offsetting the false im- 
pression created a letter was sent to the pubHc 
official which read in part as follows: 

It seems apparent that at no time did you 
have the slightest ground for publicly or privately 
charging the most serious crime in time of war, 
"treason," against a group of unnamed men; that 
the basis of your remarks was not as you at first 
stated, "sources of information," but two edi- 
torials in a New York newspaper, which simply ex- 
pressed the opinions and conclusions of the author 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS iS^ 

of the editorials regarding the stock market, and 
that your so-called retraction sought to imply that 
other acts of these New York financiers justified 
your charges, though your first surmise had 
turned out to be incorrect. 

The facts are that in both the first and the 
second Liberty Loan the New York District ex- 
ceeded every other district in the percentage of 
subscriptions to quota apportioned, that it has 
made temporary loans to the Government since 
our entry into the war, exceeding the total of all 
other districts combined, has provided not far 
from half of all the funds furnished our Govern- 
ment for war purposes, has in addition purchased 
over $100,000,000 of the bonds originally sub- 
scribed in other Federal Reserve Districts, has 
pledged for banking loans to insure a stable money 
market in aid of the Loan the sum of over $300,- 
000,000; had in the first Liberty Loan pledged a 
subscription of $300,000,000 to make up shortages 
in other districts, if required, and has led the 
country in its support of the Federal Reserve 
system by adding the resources of State banks and 
trust companies, aggregating nearly $3,000,000,000 
in a period of two months. 

Figures have just been furnished me, based 
upon the wealth of the nation in 191 2, which I 
believe to be reliable, which indicate that the New 
York Reserve District subscribed 5.13 per cent 
of the total wealth of the district to the Second 
Liberty Loan, the New York percentage being the 
highest of all the twelve districts. 

Your groundless statement has surely done no 
harm, because the facts so completely refute it. 
But the pitiable fact remains that the suspicion 



1 84 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of wrongdoing by one part of the country is im- 
planted in another section, is kept alive, nourished, 
and developed, usually for selfish political pur- 
poses, by just such irresponsible charges as yours. 

The answer seemed conclusive. But as is usual 
in such cases the retraction and refutation received 
less publicity than the unfounded charge. And one 
more false impression was planted in the public 
mind with regard to a group of men who throughout 
the war did their part up to the limit of their power, 
in New York, in Washington and throughout the 
Allied world. 

There will always be men in Wall Street who 
violate its traditions, just as there are men in every 
walk of life who are not true to themselves. But it 
may be said on information which can readily be 
verified by anyone interested in American condi- 
tions, that the standards of business and of life of 
the great majority of men who make up what the 
country knows as Wall Street, can survive the most 
rigid investigation, can even meet the searching 
idealism of ambitious American youth, and would, 
if rightly understood by the people at large, be 
matter for pride rather than censure. 

In the critical years which lie ahead of us the 
chief thing needed to give this community known 
as Wall Street its proper place in the estimation of 
the nation is that its most capable men shall lead, 
that they shall make very effort to put themselves 
and their business associates in the proper light 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 185 

before the country, to the end there shall be no mis- 
taking who and what they are and what they stand 
for; and, what is highly important, that misleading 
representations about Wall Street shall be fol- 
lowed through and nailed as false at every oppor- 
tunity, no matter what the trouble or expense. 

It is the temper of the situation which is wrong; 
the fundamentals of Wall Street are sound. The 
hostile attitude toward Wall Street is frequently 
based upon the wide acceptance of reiterated charges 
of wrongdoing, repeated accusations, endless in- 
sinuations, by politicians, by persons of bad judg- 
ment who have lost money for themselves, not only 
in New York but in almost any part of the country; 
by radicals who believe all men with large incomes 
are ipso facto dishonest; by clergymen who hold 
their congregations by sensational statements rather 
than spiritual leadership; by those entirely human 
people who feel richer if, despite their own in- 
ability to earn a living, they can once a day drag 
in the dust the good name of some business leader; 
by the occasional newspaper which makes a business 
of cultivating prejudice against groups and classes; 
and sometimes even by college professors, usually 
clear thinking and constructive, who join the chorus 
of outcry aimed at the abstraction known as Wall 
Street; and finally by the wider public who believe 
what they hear and what they read so long as no 
one bothers to offer an explanation or enter a denial. 
The time has come for the country to stop denounc- 



1 86 THE NEW FRONTIER 

ing Wall Street in the abstract, at the same time 
that it is caUing upon hundreds of individuals in 
Wall Street for national business leadership. 

The time has come for the nation to recognize the 
fact that the greatest constructive work — the most 
vigorous and most enlightened leadership and 
unselfish financial support for the Church, for art, 
for education, for the drama, for clean politics, for 
social betterment, for industrial cooperation, for 
more beautiful cities, for the improvement of 
agriculture, for efficiency in national administration, 
for a strong and independent press, have a powerful 
ally in New York City — and that the leadership 
in all these movements, through thousands of boards 
of managers, directors, trustees, advisory com- 
mittees and quiet anonymous individual givers and 
counselors, involves much of the time, energy, 
imagination and money of the business and financial 
men of New York, a typically American group in a 
typically American city. 

For, if there is any part of America which is 
fundamentally American it is Wall Street. Here, if 
anywhere, the pioneer spirit still lives. Here is a 
community where talent and character are recog- 
nized as quickly as in any part of the world today. 
Flere is a community where the majority of power is 
in the hands of men whose wealth was not inherited 
and who do not occupy their positions because of 
social prestige or influence. The proportion of Wall 
Street men who were born in New York is small. 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 187 

Side by side are presidents of corporations who 
started as office boys and others who came out of 
private schools and great universities. Nearly every 
state is represented. Most of the officers or directors 
of the large banks and corporations were born out- 
side of New York City. An analysis of one hundred 
of the most important names shows that twenty- 
eight officers of large banks, life insurance companies, 
telephone and telegraph companies and express com- 
panies were born in cities with a population of more 
than one million, and of this number, only thirteen 
were born In New York City. Of the remainder, 
only thirty men were born in cities of substantial 
size, leaving forty-two who were born in little towns 
scattered over the United States, in other words, 
country boys. These men in their daily life, coming 
as they do from all parts of the country and being 
in contact as they are in the course of business with 
every city and town throughout the entire nation, 
may be regarded as fairly representative of the 
constructive manhood of America, with all its gen- 
erosity and all its selfishness, with all its con- 
servatism and all its radicalism, with all its boyish 
love of playing the game, with its predominant 
strain of liberalism and vigor and fair dealing, that 
have made this great young country the envy of 
the world. 

There Is no better expression of this spirit than 
the New Yorker's Creed, written by Bruce Barton 
under the inspiration of a War Loan campaign. 



1 88 THE NEW FRONTIER 

and widely used as one of the advertisements of 
the Liberty Loan Committee during the Victory 
Loan: 

I am New York and this is my creed. 

I am New York; all men know my fame 
and outward aspect, but few there are who 
know my heart. 

Not out of my own loins have my people 
come. They make their way to me from the 
East, across the ocean, where the Statue in my 
harbor lights their spirits with fresh hope. 

From the West, and South, and North, 
from every farm and village, where clean- 
hearted, clear-eyed boys and girls have turned 
their faces toward me as the home of oppor- 
tunity. 

They are the builders who have made me 
great; and on what foundation stones, think 
you, have they built? 

On money? On commerce? On trade? 

They have wrought with materials more 
eternal. 

They have laid my foundations on Faith, 
and fashioned my greatness with Honor and the 
Plighted Word. 

In my markets millions in gold pass back 
and forth upon the firm security of men's trust 
in one another. 

When I give my word I do not falter. From 
every corner of the nation men have gone 
forth, relying on the promise of that word, to 
stretch great railroads across the continent; to 
open mines and rear new cities on the unbroken 
plains. 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BRAINS 189 

Because the war was fought for Right, I 
gave unsparingly my sons and my resources. 

And not until the last dollar of the cost of 
Victory is paid shall I call my task complete. 

For I am New York, the dwelling place of 
honor. 

"A city that hath foundations" — whose 
corner-stone is Faith. 

This business community, and its counterpart in 
every part of America, can supply an important 
proportion of liberal leadership in the future. The 
public problems, predominantly economic in charac- 
ter, are so complex, so endless in their variety, that 
the business men of America cannot wait to be 
drafted. They must come forward to meet the 
crisis of peace as they came forward to meet the 
crisis of war — as volunteers. 



HUMAN RESOURCES 

William James, in one of his most popular ad- 
dresses, published under the title. The Energies of 
Men, touched upon an interesting and significant 
theory of education. He emphasized not formal 
education, but the realization and utilization to the 
utmost of those human powers which usually lie 
fallow even in men and women of thorough schooling 
and active experience in the work of the world. 

Professor James suggested that the increasing 
demands of modern affairs upon the strength and 
attention of the individual can in part at least be 
met by a better organization of the powers which 
have been given us. "Let no one think, then," he 
said, "that our problem of individual and national 
economy is solely that of the maximum of pounds 
raisable against gravity, the maximum of loco- 
motion, or of agitation of any sort, that human 
beings can accomplish. That might signify little 
more than hurrying and jumping about in unco- 
ordinated ways; whereas inner work, though it so 
often reinforces outer work, quite as often means 
its arrest. To relax, to say to ourselves (with the 
'new thoughters') * Peace! be still!' is sometimes a 
great achievement of inner work. When I speak of 

190 



HUMAN RESOURCES 191 

human energizing in general, the reader must there- 
fore understand that sum-total of activities, some 
outer and some inner, some muscular, some emo- 
tional, some moral, some spiritual, of whose waxing 
and waning in himself he is at all times so well aware. 
How to keep it at an appreciable maximum? How 
not to let the level lapse ? That is the great problem." 

The thought, as he develops it, is analogous to the 
physical phenomenon of " second wind." *' Everyone 
knows what it is to start a piece of work, either 
intellectual or muscular, feeling stale. And every- 
body knows what it is to *warm up' to his job. . . . 
When we have walked, played, or worked 'enough' 
we desist. . . . But if an unusual necessity forces 
us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The 
fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, 
when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we 
are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped 
a level of new energy, masked until then by a 
fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. . . . Mental activity 
shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in 
exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very 
extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and 
power which we never dreamed ourselves to own, — 
sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, be- 
cause habitually we never push through the ob- 
struction, never pass those early critical points." 

The question at once arises, "Why do so many 
men break down in health?" The answer of James 
is, in substance, that the breakdown is due not to 



192 THE NEW FRONTIER 

work, but rather to worry, which is an abuse of the 
mind and body, or that it is due to an improper 
handling of the physical machinery of men. "Of 
course there are limits: the trees don't grow into the 
sky. But the plain fact remains that men the 
world over possess amounts of resource which only 
very exceptional individuals push to their extremes 
of use. But the very same individual, pushing his 
energies to their extreme, may in a vast number of 
cases keep the pace up day after day and find no 
'reaction' of a bad sort, so long as decent hygienic 
conditions are preserved. His more active rate of 
energizing does not wreck him; for the organism 
adapts itself, and as the rate of waste augments, 
augments correspondingly the rate of repair. ... If 
my reader will put together these two conceptions, 
first, that few men live at their maximum of energy, 
and second, that anyone may be in vital equilibrium 
at very different rates of energizing, he will find, I 
think, that a very pretty practical problem of 
national economy, as well as of individual ethics, 
opens upon his view. 

"In rough terms, we may say that a man who 
energizes below his normal maximum fails by just 
so much to profit by his chance at life; and that a 
nation filled with such men is inferior to a nation 
run at higher pressure. The problem is, then, how 
can men be trained up to their most useful pitch of 
energy? And how can nations make such training 
most accessible to all their sons and daughters? 



HUMAN RESOURCES 193 

This, after all, is only the general problem of educa- 
tion, formulated in slightly different terms." 

Of course, there will always be the other side of the 
picture. The restless sons of a pioneer race must 
learn to supplement the quest for the maximum of 
properly directed energy v/ith an occasional study 
and practice of that supplementary science "the 
idleness of men." It is a more popular science than 
the other, and for many people easier to master. 
But too many normally energetic men and women 
in America have never learned how to throw off 
every thought and care even for one waking moment 
and to give themselves up to the luxury of complete 
mental and physical idleness. We sometimes need 
a little of the philosophy of the elderly resident of 
a cross-roads not far from Springfield, Illinois, whom 
Lincoln is said to have seen sitting whittling day 
after day in complete contentment. On one occa- 
sion Lincoln's curiosity became too much for him. 
He drew up his horse and asked the old fellow what 
he did all day. "Well," was the reply, "sometimes 
I set and whittle, and sometimes I set and think — 
and sometimes I jes' set.^^ 

On the frontiers of earlier generations the neces- 
sities of existence kept a majority of men and women 
up to the full limit of their physical powers, at least. 
Today, on the new frontier the stimuli which "carry 
us over the dam" are more frequently those of the 
mind. The center of gravity of national endeavor 
and creative power has swung from the wilderness 



194 THE NEW FRONTIER 

to the crowded city. According to census figures, 
forty-six per cent of our population lives in "urban" 
territory, that is, in towns and incorporated places 
with a population of twenty-five hundred or more. 
To quote once more from WiUiam James: "The 
rapid rate of hfe, the number of decisions in an hour, 
the many things to keep account of, in a busy city 
man's or woman's life, seem monstrous to a country 
brother. He doesn't see how we live at all. A day 
in New York or Chicago fills him with terror. The 
danger and noise make it appear like a permanent 
earthquake. But settle him there, and in a year or 
two he will have caught the pulse-beat. He will 
vibrate to the city's rhythms; and if he only suc- 
ceeds in his vocation, whatever that may be, he 
will find a joy in all the hurry and the tension, he 
will keep the pace as well as any of us, and get as 
much out of himself in any week as he ever did in 
ten weeks in the country." 

This fascinating study of human power is one of 
the most pertinent which can be pursued in the 
development of men and women capable of bearing 
the brunt of the responsibility for leadership in our 
day. The principle here set forth is essentially 
simple. The application of it must be worked out 
in the laboratory of the experience and necessity of 
each individual. Everyone has examples at hand 
to observe and study. All of us know men who work 
tirelessly, during long hours, and yet seem to retain 
their physical strength and fresh creative mental 



HUMAN RESOURCES 195 

vigor. All of us are familiar with examples of men 
who push their work beyond the utmost reserve of 
their energies, and collapse. Each man must learn 
the extent of his own reserves. But when a man does 
collapse we must take care to learn whether or not 
he honestly over-taxed his power for work, or whether 
instead he did not abuse his ph3^sical strength, or, 
from another angle, whether he did not dissipate 
his energies on details which he ought to have passed 
along to other men. We shall rarely find, if we 
examine each case closely, that a man has actually 
collapsed from too much clean, well-ordered work. 

The phase of education which has just been dis- 
cussed apphes to the problem of the active men and 
women of today who seek to take a fuller part in 
the destinies of America. But to a large extent the 
equipment of most mature people of today is a 
product of the influences and educational efforts of 
a previous generation. To a large extent our po- 
tentialities are fixed beyond our power to expand 
them radically. In the longer view, therefore, the 
phase of education most profitable to consider is 
the development of new material. We are building, 
we like to believe, for eternity. We may, therefore, 
consider with no little satisfaction and hope that 
the destiny of America must soon be turned over to 
the leadership of men whose capacity for leadership 
has just begun to be demonstrated, and who are 
still to a great degree in a formative period. An 
entirely new group comes forward to do the nation's 



196 THE NEW FRONTIER 

work in each generation, and each successive group 
enters the arena equipped with the skill and strength 
and inspiration which the system of education their 
fathers established for them renders possible, A 
great opportunity for service to America lies in 
establishing the solidarity of these new men, in 
developing in them a love of country based on a 
knowledge of the spirit and not simply the letter of 
our tradition and history; in shaping in them a 
determination to conduct themselves in all their 
affairs, public and private, with a view to the 
strengthening of the nation as a whole rather than 
the mere building up of personal fortunes. 

The leadership of the future is determined by the 
education of the present. Much is being said about 
education, particularly college education. The sub- 
ject has been thrown a little out of perspective by 
the recent emphasis upon higher education, while 
the fact is lost sight of that the school system of the 
nation, the fundamental basis of our institutions, 
has not kept pace with the needs of the time. Ele- 
mentary education is the measure of the progress 
of the masses of people from a state of ignorance to 
a condition of civilization. A small proportion re- 
ceive the benefits of higher education; and these 
favored few are not true to their duty if they fail to 
demonstrate the value of that training and inspira- 
tion by working constantly to raise the standard of 
training and inspiration open to the great majority. 
Professor Henry W. Holmes of Harvard said re- 



HUMAN RESOURCES 197 

cently: "There are some 600,000 teachers in this 
country. About one-half of them are under twenty- 
five years of age. About half of them serve less than 
five years in the schools and then turn their jobs 
over to the inexperienced. About half of them had 
less than a high-school education themselves. About 
half of them have never had professional training 
at all. That is, there are about 16,000,000 children 
in this country, the future voters, that are badly 
taught." 

Professor Holmes's figure is low. We have in 
America today approximately 22,171,897 school 
children. We cannot leave to desultory instruction 
their fiiTn grounding in the principles which have 
made this nation great. There are in the country 
about 12,944,529 persons of foreign birth, of whom 
2,953,011 are unable to speak English. Their in- 
struction in the duties and privileges of American 
citizenship is one of the most pressing duties of this 
generation. If these two responsibilities are squarely 
met now, our children will not have to worry about 
Bolshevism. To meet this need a positive and 
specific body of doctrine must be taught. No child, 
no foreigner, can be expected without guidance to 
steer a true course among the reefs and shoals of 
prevalent un-American doctrines. And there is 
another point of importance in this connection. We 
cannot expect to overcome Bolshevism or sub- 
versive radicalism by knocking in the head the 
proponents of these doctrines and offering no concrete 



198 THE NEW FRONTIER 

alternative. Deporting irreconcilable Reds will 
never rid the nation of extreme radicals. But a 
large number of them can be won over to Ameri- 
canism if the true American doctrine is set forth for 
them with definiteness and adequacy. The average 
budding radical is an enthusiast. He is a person 
who feels he has a mission in the world, some great 
wrong to right, some far-reaching injustice to correct, 
some Land of Promise to win for mankind. Or he 
may simply be selfishly seeking something for noth- 
ing. In any event we cannot expect to destroy his 
vision, wrong as it is, without giving him another 
in return. And it will be an eternal shame if we 
fail, with all the wonderful possibilities for enthusiasm 
which lie in the strong, clean traditions of America, 
with the endless advantages of the nation of today, 
with the splendid promise of its future, to set up a 
standard which will win the unqualified allegiance 
of all true-hearted men and women who come to 
these shores. 

And the best method yet suggested for instilling 
something of reverence and self-reliance in the 
younger men of our day is a system of universal 
mihtary training. The story of what the training 
camps did to make aliens into Americans, to make 
physical defectives into vigorous men, to make the 
mentally weak mentally competent, to make good 
Americans better Americans, is Httle short of thrilling. 

We must have leadership, but the task of leader- 
ship becomes impossible if no one will follow. We 



HUMAN RESOURCES 199 

need leaders; but if the mass of our people are not 
trained in the ideals of the nation but are left to 
shift for themselves intellectually, they will rely 
upon those leaders who promise them only material 
benefits. Progressive leadership depends upon the 
existence of a people whose moral sense can be 
touched, who can be aroused to follow other than 
selfish purposes, who are willing to unite and vote 
for an ideal and if necessary to fight for it. 

We must raise the salaries of our school teachers. 
We must raise the salaries of our spiritual teachers 
— the clergymen. No better way has yet been sug- 
gested to guard the sacred fire in the temple and 
to preserve the forces which shape the patriotism 
of the new generation. From a practical business 
standpoint it seems hardly necessary to prove that 
the present supply of material is inadequate. Dur- 
ing the year 1919 the Chamber of Commerce of the 
State of New York received a gift of ^200,000 from 
a banker, the purpose of the fund being to develop 
efficient young men for clerical work. This banker, 
after a generation of contact with American business 
and public life, has drawn the conclusion that the 
supply of human material is not equal in volume 
and quality to the demand. Consider the whole 
fabric of American business life. There is surely 
room for better business training in a country where, 
according to Dun's figures, in the thirty years from 
1889 to 1 91 8 inclusive, the number of firms in busi- 
ness increased from 1,051,000 to 1,708,000, a total 



200 THE NEW FRONTIER 

increase of 657,000, while during the same period 
the number of failures aggregated 395,740, or sixty 
per cent. It is evident that the average business 
man is carrying a load too great for his strength and 
highest efficiency. We are not correct in thinking 
that we can show the way to the world in every 
direction, and possibly we have often given ourselves 
credit for business ability in cases where the size 
of our continent and the extent of our natural re- 
sources have been largely responsible for the results 
achieved. 

The time is at hand when greater thoroughness 
must be combined with our imagination and dash. 
It is increasingly evident, now that we have come 
more closely in contact with foreign nations, that 
while we have been developing our natural resources 
and unusual business opportunities, they have de- 
veloped standards of education and training which 
are going to be difficult for us to equal. In England, 
for example, with the crowded population and keen 
competition of their little island, the profession of 
actuary has long been considered a worthy object 
of high endeavor on the part of university men. In 
an examination recently held by a large American 
insurance company for the position of assistant 
actuary, seventeen out of twenty candidates who 
presented themselves were of Scotch or of English 
origin, the rest being Americans. It is true that one 
of the Americans was the successful candidate; but 
it is fair to say that the supply of Americans who 



HUMAN RESOURCES 201 

can compete with the trained actuary from across 
the water is very small. 

Mr, Vanderhp, in his discussion of what happened 
to Europe, answers in the affirmative the question 
as to whether or not New York is to become the 
financial center of the world; but in discussing this 
question he points out "that London bankers doubt 
our ability to create the technical organization that 
will be necessary, if we are to try to assume the 
responsibility of world financial leadership. They 
recognize frankly their present disabilities, but they 
think the safety of their position lies largely in our 
inability to create a competent technical group of 
international bankers." 

Another important consideration in our business 
world today is the handling of young men after 
they have actually entered the various organizations. 
College men, contrary to the popular impression, 
are willing to put on overalls or sit on a bench and 
answer a bell. They are ready to start doing this, 
but naturally they are not willing to keep on doing 
it after they see there is nothing ahead. If we 
spend a great deal of money in building up institu- 
tions to give a group o picked men a special training 
we ought in our business organizations to be willing 
to build up an adequate system to use these men up 
to the limit of their possibilities of economic pro- 
ductiveness. 

This point does not apply solely to college men. 
We have not as yet reached an ideal solution of the 



202 THE NEW FRONTIER 

whole problem of vocational selection, of making 
the man and the job fit each other and go forward 
together. Our employment divisions have until 
recently been equipped with men who were inclined 
to measure the head and tabulate the reactions to 
mental tests of the "subject," rather than looking 
the man in the eye and sensing his true potentialities. 
Employment directors have been under the necessity 
of establishing a system which would enable them 
to respond instantly to the voice over the telephone: 
"Send me a file clerk — quick." The employment 
director who will search out sources of supply and 
see that men were properly handled and developed 
according to their maximum abilities after they enter 
our business organizations will discharge one of the 
heaviest responsibilities in our present economic 
system. 

Of course, the bulk of the employes who go into 
our business and industrial world today are hardly 
more than boys and girls. Where do they come from, 
and who is responsible for their equipment when 
they start out to look for a job in the world? Do 
they come properly equipped? At the present time 
the answer to these questions must be that in the 
great majority of cases they come from schools 
which are conducted by a devoted group, largely 
made up of women who are not properly paid and 
from colleges whose teachers receive scandalously 
low salaries. A leading educator recently called 
attention to the fact that in these days of universal 



HUMAN RESOURCES 203 

strikes it is remarkable that the teachers, who cer- 
tainly deserve salary increases far more than many 
of the present-day strikers, have not long since put 
down their rulers and pencils and refused to continue 
until their salaries were raised. The explanation 
seems to be that the same spirit which induced them 
in the first place to undertake a line of work in which 
the personal satisfaction in the service rendered is 
its greatest reward, has kept them at their desks. 
The devotion of this great body of men and women is 
beyond praise, and it is an immediate and urgent 
responsibility of liberal leadership the country over 
to see to it that the defect of inadequate compensa- 
tion is remedied so that the children in our schools 
shall not be placed in the position of gaining their 
fundamental education in an atmosphere of strikes 
and lock-outs, or at best of petty pohtics. 

Tardily but effectively the colleges are endeavoring 
to. raise enough money to give their professors a 
living wage. Men and women have gone through 
our colleges and universities for some hundreds of 
years receiving a training which has actually cost 
in dollars spent on the individual student much more 
than the student has paid in tuition. The graduates 
have gone cheerfully on their way taking deep satis- 
faction in their Alma Mater, and meanwhile the Alma 
Mater has come very near starving to death. We 
may well be proud of the colleges which turned out 
such an extraordinary proportion of the officers of 
the American army in France, and yet we have been 



204 THE NEW FRONTIER 

content to let our college professors train successive 
generations of young men, and receive salaries which 
have not made it possible for the professors to send 
their own sons through college. Following the 
leadership of Harvard, the campaigns of Cornell, 
Princeton, Technology, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Welles- 
ley and other colleges should mark a new era and 
initiate a movement calculated forever to put an 
end to a flagrant form of neglect which has been at- 
tacking the very roots of our national greatness by 
endangering the supply of trained leadership in the 
Republic, Our next duty is to see to it that the 
same service is rendered the teachers in our public 
schools. 

One detail of the wide program for the improve- 
ment of our human material involves more personal 
contact with schools on the part of grown-ups. Men 
and women of vision and training can render great 
service if they will systematically go into the schools 
and talk to children. One of the most helpful plans 
under consideration has been developed by a New 
York business man who suggests the formation of 
representative committees throughout the United 
States with the ofiicial sanction of the state, city 
and town authorities, each man or woman to make 
two or three short, carefully prepared talks each 
year in schoolrooms of the vicinity. 

Men forget how susceptible children are to ideas 
acquired in such a way. It is the finest sort of public 
service, because it touches the foundations of charac- 



HUMAN RESOURCES 205 

ter which are the ultimate basis of the greatness of 
the nation. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
in his essay on politics, "We think our civilization 
near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock- 
crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous 
society the influence of character is in its infancy. 
As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to 
tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is 
hardly yet suspected. . . . What is strange, too, 
there never was in any man sufficient faith in the 
power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad 
design of renovating the State on the principle of 
right and love, . . . that human beings might 
exercise toward each other the grandest and simplest 
sentiments, as well as a knot of friends or a pair of 
lovers." - • 

An ideal of this kind, if it can be established at all, 
must be deeply ingrained in the youth of the land 
if it is to withstand the wear and tear of a practical 
world. ■ , 

As to the matter ot* college training, it is idle to 
question its value to the individual or to the nation. 
The perennial discussion of the college man in 
business would have some basis if the claim had 
been advanced that all college men were better 
trained than all non-college men. This is not true. 
Many men are born with natural capacity and 
ambition which surmounts all obstacles. The right 
man will succeed wherever he is. It may even 
be said that a certain type of restless energy is 



2o6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

rarely helped by college because it never truly 
submits itself to the college influences. In general, 
however, it is probably true that most successful 
men who are not college graduates would have found 
their true success more easily and more fully if they 
had had the benefit of college training. And, in 
general, college men entering business today are 
proving by their willingness to begin at the bottom, 
their evident ambition, their adaptability and good 
presence that their Investment of money and of 
precious years in college work has not been thrown 
away. 

The opportunities for college-trained men in the 
business and public life of the future are endless. 
But we must regard the college man for what he is. 
The graduate of a business college is not a business 
man. Neither is the graduate of a law school a 
lawyer, or the graduate of a medical school a doctor. 
All these men have learned to think with a certain 
thoroughness and have established their habits of 
thought on a basis of organization rather than upon 
pure superficiality and chance. But all these men 
must learn their actual work by doing it. From a 
practical standpoint their claim upon the community 
lies not In what they know but in their determination 
to learn quickly coupled with a capacity to do so. 
Beyond this, too, the majority of these men have 
acquired a breadth of viewpoint, a liberality, one 
may say, which comes from a liberal education. 
They have, as a rule, a certain capacity for meeting 



HUMAN RESOURCES '207 

new situations and for exerting initiative which 
makes rapidly for winning the confidence of their 
superiors and their associates. This is the natural 
basis for success, and for leadership. 

These results of college training bear more upon 
method of approach and indeed upon character than 
upon technique; and it is this viewpoint which needs 
to be appreciated in order to comprehend the value 
and the limitations of the young graduate entering 
his hfe work. He knows very httle. If he is the 
right sort of man he quickly discovers how little he 
knows — and right here enters the true secret of 
his success; for the discovery of his limitations does 
not break his spirit. He has wandered through 
realms of high aspiration; his college life has given 
him a glimpse of the great hopes and achievements 
of men, of the rise and fall of nations, of art and 
literature and the great permanent, basic elements 
of human happiness. His flag is nailed to the mast. 
No matter how far short he may fall of his highest 
ambition he will rarely let himself fall short of the 
best that there is in him. More than this no man 
can do. 

All this constitutes a form of idealism, a setting 
up of standards, and a loyalty to those standards. 
Loyalty is the essence of it. It is not simply a 
college product. Lincoln acquired it in a log cabin 
and a law office. But it is the highest object of 
education, and the university is the highest form of 
systematic training human ingenuity has so far 



208 THE NEW FRONTIER 

been able to devise. College-trained men and women 
are entering into the hard work of the nation to an 
extent which should leave no question as to the im- 
portance of making that training increasingly easy 
of access to the young men and women of the coun- 
try, irrespective of any consideration except their 
ambition and the possession of reasonable qualifica- 
tion to undertake it. 

There is another and a still broader aspect to 
college education. Aside from turning out keen and 
intelligent workers, the greatest value to be expected 
from the higher education is the responsibility it 
teaches for leadership in national affairs, politics, 
social service, and the formation of public opinion. 
Most business men without college training can, if 
they will, do constructive work along the lines of 
public service. But the college man cannot omit 
such service without being false to a trust. It is 
expected of him. He is supposed to be equipped for 
it. Others consciously, and to some extent properly, 
leave it to him to do. 

President Lowell, in a recent address in connection 
with the Harvard Endowment Fund campaign, 
called attention to the tremendous loss of university 
men in the war. Some of the colleges of Oxford 
and Cambridge had entire classes wiped out. 
He said that this great tragedy placed a responsi- 
bility upon the college-trained men of America. "I 
remember early in this war, while horrors were still 
fresh in our mindsi, and before the martial desire 



HUMAN RESOURCES 209 

had to some extent replaced the sense of pure sym- 
pathy, that I used to think of the battlefields on the 
Marne, in Flanders, of the faces turned up to the 
moon with sightless eyes, of thousands and thou- 
sands of young men, and wonder who was dead 
among those young men; whether there was among 
them any man who would have been a future Pasteur, 
any mute, inglorious Milton, any man who would 
have contributed greatly to the advance of human 
knowledge and the relief of human suffering, to the 
elevation of the human soul. We do not know what 
the future might have held for those who lie dead 
on those fields, but v/e do know that among those 
young men who have died, among the French and 
among the English, — who have lost vastly more 
men than we have, — are many who would have 
contributed greatly to the advance of the human 
race, and to the progress of civilization. We know 
very well that a large portion of the most promising 
youth of Western Europe has been destroyed, cut 
off in their prime, and we know that many more 
have been incapacitated for future work by the loss 
of their eyes or loss of their limbs and the consequent 
loss of their health, which will prevent them ever 
exerting the natural powers that they would other- 
wise have had. 

"And, it seems to me, it has thrown a responsi- 
bility on the United States. We stand out today 
not only as the first nation in wealth, the first nation 
in the great natural material resources, but we also 



2IO THE NEW FRONTIER 

stand as the standard bearer of civilization. The 
world looks to us, and will continue to look to us 
for holding up civilization and for advancing it. 
Hitherto we have not contributed our share to the 
advancement of thought of the world, and for a very- 
good reason we have not done it. We have accom- 
plished a feat unparalleled in history. In the course 
of a hundred years we have subdued a whole 
continent, a continent inhabited only by people un- 
civilized. We have covered the whole of that conti- 
nent with a network of railroads; we have exploited 
its mines, we have covered it with flourishing towns; 
we have filled it with the hum of industry; and that 
is enough for any population to have done in a 
hundred years. But we have not contributed to 
advance the thought of the world, to the extent that 
we ought to contribute in the future. 

"There were two nations of antiquity which I 
like to compare. Each of them in its turn had all 
the commerce of the Mediterranean in its hand; 
they were great, rich commercial people. One of 
them fell under the stroke of Rome, to wit, Carthage. 
And what has Carthage left, except the Roman 
accounts of her brave and in many cases glorious 
battles? But what else has she left to enrich man- 
kind? Has she left any literature, any science, any- 
thing which tended to the uplifting and the progress 
of the world? Nothing whatever. It is gone. Why? 
Because Rome destroyed her? Oh, no; if she had 
done anything that was really worth doine in the 



HUMAN RESOURCES 21 1 

world, except amassing trade, we should have 
known it; because the other country was equally 
overwhelmed by Rome, and that was Athens, and 
yet Athens has left a richer legacy to the world than 
any other people of her size has ever left since the 
world began. Rome conquered her, but her civiliza- 
tion conquered Rome. No one of us can think apart 
from the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle. We would 
never have had the literature, the art, and all the 
things that adorn modern civilization, had it not 
been for Greece. 

*'Now the choice is before us today; shall we be 
merely a commercial people? Shall we be merely the 
Carthage of the modern age? Or do we aspire to 
be a Greece of the modern age? It lies with the 
people of the United States. They can decide at 
any time. We have plenty of brains in America; 
we have, I believe, brains equal in natural capacity 
to those of any country in Europe, Shall we be a 
great people in the sense in which Athens was a 
great people? Or, shall we be a great people only 
in the sense in which Carthage was a great people?" 

The ideas and influences which are stirring the 
peoples of the world as the result of the war indicate 
a turning point in history. There never was so wide 
an opportunity for men of training and vision, 
whether or not they get their training and vision in 
college or out of coHege. The answer to the momen- 
tous question which Dr. Lowell asks regarding the 
future of America rests to a large extent with the 



212 THE NEW FRONTIER 

young men and women who are about to take up 
their burden of running the greatest repubhc in 
the world, and with the milHons of children in our 
public schools who are now learning the first simple 
elements of the great lesson of responsible citizenship. 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 

Mr. Pomeroy Burton, Manager of the London 
Daily Mail, recently spent some time in this coun- 
try, and left with us some impressions of his visit 
to the Coast and back. 

"I was particularly impressed," he says, "with 
the general lack of interest in other than local affairs 
on the part of many business men who represented 
leading commercial and financial activities. In some 
sections I found them inclined to take the present 
exceptional state of prosperity as a normal state of 
affairs and they were therefore in a thoroughly com- 
placent frame of mind, not bothering their heads 
much about labor or European affairs or anything 
else except their own business. 

"But it is fair to say that this attitude was not 
without exception. This policy has provided the 
extremist leaders who are now in control of the 
labor situation with their strongest weapon, and that 
weapon has been used unsparingly to force into the 
radical camp many thousands of straight working 
men who have no real sympathy with their present 
leaders and who would welcome a change to get on 
the right track. 

"False leaders and unsound theories are prevailing 
partly by sheer force of persistence, and because of 

213 



214 THE NEW FRONTIER 

lack of leadership on the side of common sense and 
justice. 

"Today, by means of systematic organization and 
ceaseless activity the radical labor leaders are making 
headway in the western states, sweeping into line 
great numbers of wage earners, many of them prop- 
erty owners themselves, who would welcome a 
sounder, saner program if only one were provided. 

"It seems to be time for a strong lead to be given 
which will encourage the people, especially the work- 
ing people who are being led sadly astray, to think 
straight and understand the basic element of the 
labor question and of other questions equally im- 
portant, which must be dealt with in the interest of 
the country at large. 

"It devolves upon the aroused business men of 
this country more than upon any other class or 
body of citizens to get properly to work and save the 
situation. It will not do for capital, as capital, to 
raise a big fund and start out to fight this radical 
movement. If it tried that today, the chances are 
that capital would be beaten. The extremist 
leaders would welcome such a challenge. 

"But if the men who represent all grades and 
kinds of business throughout every part of the 
United States were to unite in a movement, not to 
fight labor, not to fight capital, but fearlessly to 
expose the faults of both and simply and fairly to 
spread the truth they could turn the whole trend 
of events and avert consequences that are not 
pleasant to contemplate.'* 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 215 

Here we have a significant situation fairly stated 
and a remedy suggested. It is a line of action which 
the plaintiffs in the present situation have not 
failed to take advantage of at every turn. From 
the standpoint of propaganda, the radical agitators 
are the most active and prolific single element in 
the modern forum. A soldier in France who had 
been a teamster and whom the war inspired to give 
some thought to the question of social unrest, has 
made the following comment on extremist literature: 
*'The average worker is a newspaper reader and the 
more advanced and influential amongst them are 
readers of all sorts of pamphlets and books on 
labor questions. The propagandists of Bolshevism, 
Syndicalism, and all the other -isms know well this 
keenness of the thinking class of workers for litera- 
ture of all sorts on labor and social questions and 
they take good care that such seekers after knowl- 
edge are well provided with cleverly-written matter 
supporting all the -isms fostering class hatred and 
stirring up trouble. The volume of such Hterature 
is too great to be the outcome of chance; the skill 
with which it is written, the subtlety and clever- 
ness with which fractions of what the workers 
know to be truths are distorted, magnified, and built 
up into plausible arguments and reasoning show 
clearly that brains and organization are at the 
back of this 'revolutionary' movement. And yet 
no serious attempt is made to stem the torrent of 
this evil influence; no really effective measures are 



2i6 THE NEW FRONTIER 

taken to expose the lies, fallacies, false arguments 
and reasonings which are heaped upon the workers. 
For this the blame can rest only on the employers. 
There are, we know, certain sane and level-headed 
labor leaders who, by articles, by speeches at their 
meetings and conferences try to tell the workers 
the truth. But these men can do httle on their 
own; and the revolutionary element in the unions 
takes good care that the truth-telling, anti-revo- 
tutionary leaders are allowed no time nor money 
to spend on counteracting the propaganda of the 
-isms. You can find plenty of great 'captains of 
industry,' leaders of trade, large manufacturers 
and employers of labor, who know well and curse 
heartily the evil propaganda, who grumble that 
something ought to be done, and wonder why the 
Government or the trade unions do not do it; but 
there are few who dream of doing it themselves. 
The revolutionaries can and do spend skill, energy, 
initiative and money on propaganda — why can- 
not the anti-revolutionaries? They would begin 
with the enormous advantage of needing only to 
tell the truth, and the truth must win if it is told 
widely and plainly enough." 

Propaganda is needed, if by propaganda is meant 
the telling of the truth. The real crux of the matter 
is here. The facts are needed, patience is called 
for, an attitude of mind and heart is demanded, 
which aims at agreement and not at war; if these 
things are the material for the propaganda to 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 217 

convey, then, within Hmits it will be useful. We 
need a union of persons who are trained and elo- 
quent advocates of the truth, not for any personal 
gain, except as it may accrue to the benefit to the 
nation as a whole. And this organization must 
use the weapons of publicity to win credence for 
the doctrines of liberal people just as persistently 
and skillfully as these weapons are being used by 
the proponents of lightning change in the fabric 
of our institutions. 

Let us analyze a little this great modern publicity 
machinery. Whether in the form of paid adver- 
tising or in the form of news serving specific 
ends, it is essential to life as it is Hved in civil- 
ized countries today. It has been defined as the art 
of making known. Whether we think of America 
primarily in its political or social phase, or whether 
we think of it in its business phase and emphasize 
its tremendous activities of production and distribu- 
tion, the art of making known is equally essential. 

In a democracy, unless it is known what people 
think about one another, what opinions and ac- 
tivities exist throughout the country, society can- 
not function as a coherent whole. In the diversity 
of our national life, with its widely separated com- 
munities and local conditions and interests, dif- 
fering so greatly in atmosphere and the flavor of 
tradition, with geographic barriers of mountain 
and prairie, and human barriers of fused and un- 
fused racial elements, the disintegrating influences in 



2i8 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the way of a unified American nation would be in- 
superable were it not for the binding effect of the 
publicity that daily places in the minds of all the 
people of the country the same major ideas and 
events. Although each community is vitally con- 
cerned with its local interests, it is national news 
that dominates the best thought in all communities, 
and simultaneously puts before them the same set 
of facts as the basis for a national viewpoint and 
judgment. This circumstance is the greatest single 
influence in the formation of the definitely national 
culture and national attitude of mind, which are 
the fundamentals of patriotism. 

This is true not only of the political questions of 
the hour, but also of a great many social and eco- 
nomic questions. Papers from all sections of the 
country at any given period are largely pervaded 
by the same tone, because methods of publicity, 
of making known particular phases of thought or 
of activity, have developed ways of diffusing knowl- 
edge on any particular subject throughout the ex- 
tensive news system of the nation. One day it is 
prohibition that leads the publicity thought of the 
country; another day it is the ownership of the 
nation's railway system; another day political 
questions predominate. One week radical agita- 
tion holds sway, and the next the League of Nations 
is foremost in the nation's reading. All of this is 
publicity, whether it be produced through speeches 
at pubHc gatherings, through widespread per- 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 219 

sonal organization, or through statements sent 
broadcast to the press. All are methods of laying 
before the plebescite of the nation facts and figures 
which will first stir them to an interest in a subject 
and then lead them to reach a decision. It is the 
right arm of democracy. 

This delicate and powerful machinery seems to be 
almost perfect. And yet the responsibihties in- 
volved are so great that it may confidently be stated 
that we have only begun to realize them. One 
forward step, foreshadowed by the great news 
services, may well be a greater concentration of in- 
dividual news units. In France there are four 
great newspapers with a combined circulation of 
7,600,000. The ten papers in the United States with 
the largest sworn circulation in November, 1919, 
were the following: (in this order) New York 
Journaly Boston Post, Philadelphia Bulletin^ Kansas 
City Star and Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago 
News, New York (Morning) World, New York 
Times, New York (Evening) World and New York 
American, with a total circulation of 4,099,712. 
There are in the country as a whole 21,493 pubhca- 
tions, including 2363 dailies, 14,714 weeklies, 3148 
monthlies, 342 quarterlies, and 926 miscellaneous. 
Despite the vast geographical extent of the country, 
it would not seem unreasonable to expect, with the 
wonderful extension of telegraph and cable facili- 
ties, a further increase in uniformity and vigor in 
the presentation of news and opinion, and a con- 



220 THE NEW FRONTIER 

stantly increasing circulation for great and ably 
edited journals. 

Good advertising often has news value. But 
generally speaking, advertising is that phase of 
publicity which seeks to make known not news, 
but an accurate and vivid set of facts or opinions, 
and to induce definite action as a result. Our 
present industrial and business organization in- 
volves keen competition and narrow margins of 
profit. To make business pay requires an extensive 
market with a large consumption to absorb the 
output of quantity-production methods. Only by 
quantity-production and a wide scale of distribu- 
tion can a narrow margin of profit be made to 
produce sufficient return to attract capital. There- 
fore, to produce a large volume of sales, the art of 
making known to America's hundred million people 
scattered over the three million square miles of 
territory in this vast country, is essential to busi- 
ness; and the value and virtues of a product must 
be exploited with the utmost skill and persistency. 
Organization, expansion and big units characterize 
the genius of American business today and explain 
the necessity and the responsibility of the great 
advertising organization of the United States. 

Few people realize the magnitude and Importance 
of the business of advertising. It is estimated that 
$750,000,000* is spent in the United States annually 

* Printer's Ink, September 19, 1918: — The periodical Publishers' 
Association, through John Adams Thayer, reports as follows on expen- 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 221 

for advertising of all kinds. In some cases it is 
hard to segregate the amounts spent in advertis- 
ing as distinguished from sales promotion and 
actual distribution through salesmen, but the figure 
quoted is sufficiently accurate to suggest the enorm- 
ous investment in America today in this one branch 
of the art of putting power behind facts. 

During the war the power of advertising was 
clearly demonstrated, and the wonderfully versatile 
advertising men of the nation came together as a 
unit to put at the services of the Liberty Loan and 
other war committees their vision and skill in arous- 
ing public support and the desire to buy. This 

ditures for 1916 stating that "1917 would not be different from the 
previous year": 

Daily newspapers $375,000,000 

Country newspapers 34,000,000 

Posted and painted signs 30,000,000 

Street cars 10,000,000 

Farm papers 15,000,000 

Business papers 10,000,000 

Magazines and periodicals 50,000,000 

$524,000,000 

To this Mr. Thayer would add in round numbers, which are, of course, 
approximate, $200,000,000 a year for miscellaneous other forms of 
advertising, making a grand total of nearly three quarters oj a billion 
dollars — missing that figure by only $26,000,000; and what are twenty- 
six million dollars between friends when we are being statistical? 

Mr. Thayer's list does not include theater programs, for which the 
figure of $5,000,000 is given by Ralph Trier, of the New York Theater 
Program Corporation, as being as close as could be expected to the real 
amount. To the estimate of $15,000,000 for farm papers, an authority 
in that field adds $7,000,000, making $22,000,000 all told. The con- 
census of opinion of three exponents of street car advertising, averaging 



222 THE NEW FRONTIER 

far-reaching cooperation with the Government in 
war time has led to suggestions involving a per- 
manent policy of Government advertising. This 
subject deserves careful study; but it may be 
suggested that it will prove advisable to confine 
Government paid advertising to the setting forth of 
facts, rather than to expanding it in the direction 
of propaganda. It is hardly the function of a. 
democratic government to guide the thoughts and 
desires of its people in too much detail. It may 
well be true, however, that a great deal can be done 
by advertising to the public the facilities of the 
Government along the lines of agriculture; ad- 
vertising to business men how the Customs Service 



their estimates, is one million more than Mr. Thayer's $15,000,000. 
Jesse H. Neal, of the Associated Business Papers, Inc., says $25,000,000 
to $40,000,000 was spent last j^ear in the business press. For specialty 
advertising, figures compiled some years ago by the National Associa- 
tion of Advertising Specialty Manufacturers are believed to be correct 
today. The estimate then given was $30,000,000. 

Modifying Mr. Thayer's estimate in the light of these data (and 
averaging Mr. Neal's statement) gives a total of $605,000,000 for these 
forms of advertising only. There yet remains, of course, the question 
of samples and demonstration, distributing, house organs and all other 
forms of direct advertising. , . . The most exact of the figures on direct 
mail give a total of $442,500,000. This was achieved by taking all the 
manufacturers, wholesalers, jobbers, retailers, mail-order houses, etc , 
in the United States, estimating an average appropriation for direct 
mail, and combining the aggregates. Thirty-nine thousand high-rated 
manufacturers are estimated to spend $5,000 each; 100,000 other 
manufacturers $500 each; 40,000 wholesalers and jobbers $500 each; 
1,500,000 retailers $50 each; 100,000 banks, real estate companies, 
brokers, etc., $500 each; 800 mail order houses $50,000 each; 2,500 
department stores $5,000 each. It will readily be seen what enormous 
possibilities for error are contained in estimates made in this fashion. 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 223 

functions; advertising to the public the technicali- 
ties of the tax system; and in a hundred other 
ways aiding our public officials to play the part of 
an intelligent public service corporation in facilitat- 
ing the fullest possible public participation in the 
benefits created for the public advantage. 

It is remarkable how this great system has de- 
veloped in the past few years. Not that publicity 
is new. The Egyptians had their books and maga- 
zines and bulletins, and as they were carved on 
solid rock they were far more durable than ours 
will ever be. But the sporting news must have 
been rather dull reading after it had remained cut 
into the side of a palace for five or ten centuries. 
If one of the venerable mummies in the Metropolitan 
Museum should suddenly come to life he might 
well find the war-bulletins carved in the Central 
Park obelisk somewhat musty and primitive. Even 
Caesar established a more up-to-date news agency. 
Ferrero says, in his Greatness and Decline of Rome: 
"It was he who originated at Rome what we should 
describe in modern language as a popular news- 
paper. With the increase of wealth and education 
curiosity had very naturally kept pace, and there 
were people in Rome who sought to gain a living by 
doing something analogous to the modern journals. 
They gathered what they considered to be the most 
important and interesting public and private in- 
formation of the day and at regular intervals they 
collected it into a small handbook and had it copied 



224 THE NEW FRONTIER 

several times by a slave, distributing copies to 
subscribers. Naturally this was a luxury which 
only the rich could afford. Caesar seems to have 
passed a decree that one of the magistrates should 
be entrusted with the duty of causing a resume of 
the most important news to be inscribed on white- 
washed walls in different parts of the city, with the 
arrangement that when the news was stale the walls 
should be whitewashed again for other news to take 
its place. In this way even the poorest people 
could be kept informed about all that went on." 

And then Ferrero records an item which must 
have been of great significance to the people of 
Rome if by chance treaties of peace were ever 
under discussion in those days: "Caesar also ar- 
ranged that reports of sittings of the Senate should 
be made in a more regular manner and put at the 
disposition of the pubhc." 

But the greatest contrast between old and new 
pubHcity facilities is to be seen in the development 
of our own nation. In the Federal Convention 
which drafted the national Constitution in the sum- 
mer of 1787, after a war fought to a considerable 
extent on the basis of popular rights, there was 
naturally a substantial sentiment in favor of the 
direct popular election of the president; but one 
of the great objections raised was that a candidate 
proposed in Massachusetts would not be known in 
Virginia, and one brought forward in Carolina would 
be wholly unfamiliar in Maine. The suggestion in 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 225 

the Convention that the electors should be chosen 
by the state legislature and that a meeting of these 
electors should then be held in the Federal city to 
decide upon a chief magistrate, was met by the 
very serious objection that it was considered im- 
possible to find really suitable men who would be 
able to undertake so long and difficult a journey 
for such a purpose. 

It is hard for the modern mind to take the jump 
from colonial days with high cost of postage, the 
alm.ost entire absence of newspapers, and the almost 
unbelievable difficulty of transportation, to the pres- 
ent day with its two cent postage, its network of 
railroads and highroads, its twenty-three thousand 
newspapers and magazines, its telephone and tele- 
graph and wireless and airplane service. Today we 
have the common experience of presidential candi- 
dates travehng with comparative ease thousands 
of miles from one end of the country to the other 
and speaking before millions of people during a few 
months of compaigning, with their life histories in 
the possession of everyone and every detail of their 
features familiar to dwellers in remotest farms and 
cabins throughout the nation, and finally millions 
of votes cast in a single day and the full results 
generally tabulated and made known by nightfall. 

It is the function of the newspapers to disseminate 
news promptly, and of the magazines to disseminate 
views thoroughly, and of both to disseminate this 
material widely. It is essentially the function of 



226 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the great news service to disseminate facts instan- 
taneously. Thus, hterally within less than a minute 
all the communities of the United States may be 
informed of a great event or set thinking about the 
same question. Take as an example an instance 
of the lighter side of our national hfe. When the 
World's Series baseball games are being played, 
the Associated Press links up about 30,000 miles of 
telegraph wire on a single circuit extending to news- 
paper offices in cities, towns and villages throughout 
the country, before whose bulletin boards, in many 
cases, foregathers virtually the entire population. 
In the press stand at the game sits a telegraph 
operator, and shortly before the game is called he 
begins to send out a monotonous series of rhythmical 
ticks to "warm" the wires and focus the attention 
of the receiving operators throughout the country. 
Beside him stands an observant reporter to dictate 
a running story of the game. The monotonous 
series of ticks which spell no words is interrupted 
only to send the few brief words describing each 
move. Thus in less than a minute from the time 
"Babe" Ruth swats the ball a primitive bang, 
sending It over the fence for a home run, the entire 
American people Is aware of the fact. 

This system of sending news Instantaneously to 
the entire nation Is not without its social significance 
in its power to unite the thoughts of the nation on a 
single idea. For even if the same expedition is not 
used In regard to all news as in the baseball game. 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 227 

it IS never more than a few minutes before the 
whole country has been apprised of events of national 
importance by the alert wires of the news agencies. 
The availabihty of this great instrumentaHty for 
instantaneous news dissemination, always at hand, 
has potentialities which have not yet been fully 
developed. National unity must be based upon 
national conviction, but the conviction of a hundred 
milHon people must be based upon setting the facts 
before them promptly and faithfully. The system 
of disseminating news by flashes, bulletins and short 
telegraphic reports tends to keep this form of news 
purified of bias and exaggeration, because sheer 
brevity restricts the reports to absolute facts, and 
the wide variety of newspaper membership in the 
news associations precludes partisanship. 

It may be too much to say that the newspapers 
and magazines of the country won the war. It 
certainly is fair to say that without them we never 
should have gone into the war and played the de- 
ciding part that it was our opportunity to play in 
the greatest struggle of all time. Without them the 
people of the country could never have been aroused 
to an understanding of the situation and to a real- 
ization of their responsibility. 

Without the newspapers of the country the war 
could not have been financed. The newspapers 
were the foundation stone of the great Liberty 
Loan campaigns which in an actual selling period 
of 115 days placed in the hands of approximately 



228 THE NEW FRONTIER 

25,000,000 people unaccustomed to investment 
^21,500,000 of Government securities. In the great 
emergency the papers of the country without re- 
gard to any consideration but patriotism placed 
their news columns at the disposal of the Liberty 
Loan Committees. In the City of New York alone 
the newspapers published without charge to the 
Government and excluding paid advertising about 
25,000 columns of material covering the five Liberty 
Loans. The war campaigns were a tremendous 
demonstration of the power of the press to educate, 
stimulate and organize public opinion. The lesson 
of these campaigns for the future is that the leaders 
of public opinion must study this gigantic power, 
semi-public in character, and play their part in 
helping it to discharge its great responsibility 
fairly and truly. 

Of course, there is a danger in our time, when so 
much is printed, that people should think that 
everything in print is true and regard those things 
which do not get into print as almost non-existent. 
A great deal goes on that does not get into the 
papers and a great many movements and campaigns, 
political and other, get themselves accomplished 
with the papers in opposition. It has not escaped 
observation that the elections of the chief execu- 
tives of two of our great American cities have re- 
cently been brought about in spite of the almost 
united opposition of the local press. The springs 
which supply the impulse for popular movements 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 229 

often lie deeper than the editorial pencil. But in 
spite of the occasional striking manifestations of 
popular independence of the press it may be said 
that by and large, day after day and year after 
year, the greatest single influence upon public opinion 
in modern times is the printed word. 

This being so, public spirited men for the past ten 
years have developed a more or less standardized 
form of influencing pubhc opinion, known as a 
pubhcity campaign. This undertaking in its simple 
form involves the appointment of a salaried cam- 
paign manager who divides up the country into 
districts and employs assistants to go into the vari- 
ous cities and towns and interview editors of papers 
and representative men, including, for example, the 
labor leader, the head of the local grange, a promi- 
nent banker, lawyer, clergyman, the head of the 
women's organization, the Chamber of Commerce, 
the Rotary Club. The opinions of these leaders 
are forwarded to headquarters and a card catalogue 
made up. Pamphlets are issued for general circula- 
tion and interviews are prepared for local papers, 
issuing from the influential men in each section 
whose names will carry a "story" in the communi- 
ties in which they are known. I 

Finally, after this quiet work has gone on for some 
months, assuming that the object is to accomplish 
legislation, a canvass is made of Congress to ascer- 
tain the Lttitude of representatives and senators 
toward the measure in question. A list is made of 



230 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the members who are indined not to favor the bill. 
Reference is made to the card catalogue covering 
leaders of thought in their respective constituencies, 
and letters are forthcoming to Washington from men 
who can write to their representatives in a par- 
ticularly intimate way, or in what may be called 
the "Dear Bill style." 

In the typical case, where the measure involved 
appeals fully and promptly to the people of the 
country, this sort of campaign has merely organized 
public sentiment and has brought about at an early 
date the passage of the bill which probably would 
have passed anyway. Such a campaign should not 
be very expensive. Modern organization methods, 
especially following the lessons of the war, have 
standardized such campaigns calling for simple 
and straightforward action, upon a basis which 
need not involve the dangers surrounding the out- 
lay of vast sums of money. The general rule holds, 
of course, that the more publicity used within 
reasonable limits the quicker the desired results 
are obtained. The Liberty Loan campaigns were, 
in gross outlay, the most expensive in history. The 
work to be done in a few weeks was stupendous, 
both from the standpoint of the amount of bonds 
to be sold and the number of people to be reached. 
The cost was, therefore, actually very large. But 
relatively it was small. The entire publicity ex- 
pense of the loan campaigns, including advertis- 
ing, news service, parades, speakers and a great 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 231 

variety of features, indoors and out, was less than 
one-twenty-fifth of one per cent of the amount 
realized. 

One great advantage of this form of the modern 
pubhcity campaign is that it has to a great extent 
taken the lobbyist out of Washington. From the 
standpoint of the newspaper editor it has the dis- 
advantage of bearing down very heavily upon his 
powers of discrimination because of the great 
variety of literature which comes over his desk. 
Here again the standard is improving, however, 
and the day of the press agent who turns out false 
and flowery matter in endless bulk to stuff the 
waste baskets of ten thousand editors is happily 
passing away. To an increasing extent the material 
which editors are receiving is actual news. A study 
of any daily newspaper will show that a substantial 
portion of the material published is prepared outside 
of newspaper offices. But for the material daily 
sent to editors as "publicity," and often complained 
of by them, the reportorial and editorial salary rolls 
of American newspapers would need to be increased 
by many hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. 

In the future publicity work will need to be 
more and more expertly managed as the machinery 
becomes more generally familiar. Not only will 
the managers of campaigns have to be better 
trained and better paid men, but the leaders of 
opinion who serve on the directorates of the cam- 
paign organizations, and furnish a large part of 



232 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the funds, will have to give more close personal at- 
tention, first of all to a most careful analysis of the 
character of the campaigns undertaken, their public 
advantage and their timeliness, and after the cam- 
paigns have started they will have to devote more 
time to putting their own personality and enthusiasm 
into the organization and publicity. Brain-power 
and vision cannot be delegated. Tremendous mis- 
takes have been made through simply "hiring some- 
one to do it" and paying out vast sums to people 
who didn't do it. 

The liberal leaders of the future must be more 
accessible to the newspapers. In the old days when 
the standards of newspapers were lower, when they 
were crowded with utterly false stories and shame- 
less advertisements of bogus medicines and bogus 
stocks, and when the standards of business were 
lower, a natural antipathy developed between these 
two essential elements of our modern life. But 
in these days when the standards of all but a very 
few of our great newspapers are clean and straight- 
forward and when the average business man has 
very little to conceal on the grounds of policy and 
nothing because of its impropriety, the newspaper 
man should be a welcome visitor. 

Of course, there is a reciprocal responsibility. 
It imposes upon newspaper men a greater degree 
of responsibility not only to the person who 
receives them, not only to their own papers, but 
to the general public. An ideal reporter, of 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 233 

course, serves as the true eyes and ears of the 
great absent pubHc, and he therefore has a public 
duty to perform, — that of seeing, hearing and 
reporting truthfully, fearlessly, without bias. Un- 
less he does this, the public becomes blinded, it 
hears falsely and is misled into erroneous con- 
structions and unfortunate judgments. The re- 
sponsibiHty of hearing and seeing rightly implies 
that a reporter should see the facts that are given 
to him in their true perspective and sense the ex- 
istence of essential facts which are being withheld. 
It requires that he be trained in the power of analysis 
and discrimination, and that he have a keen sense 
of proportion and a minimum of personal bias. 
Only when a reporter carries these qualities into his 
work is he serving the public well and when he does 
he is entitled to the open door. Intelligent de- 
mocracy Is founded on a popular understanding of 
facts, and unless these facts are presented to the 
public fairly, cleanly and honestly, the basis of 
democracy in a country of the size and complexity 
of modern America, cannot be sound. 

Naturally, there are times for publicity and times 
for silence; but there Is no time when a newspaper 
man should be shown the door empty-handed. This 
may be said almost without qualification, because 
there are very few instances on record, in the past de- 
cade of constant newspaper contact with the most 
vital developments of business and political life, where 
a newspaper man has violated a confidence and pub- 



234 THE NEW FRONTIER 

lished a story which he has been asked to keep 
confidential. Gradually business men are coming to 
realize that the newspaper man is their friend and 
that in the great constructive work which lies 
ahead of the leaders of the future, in bringing about 
mutual understanding between the business world 
and labor, and between both these agencies and the 
pubHc which is so profoundly affected by the mis- 
takes and successes of both, the newspapers of the 
nation will play a vital part. 

The same is true of pohtics. The pubHc is en- 
titled to know what its public servants are doing. 
There are times to reveal measures in full, and times 
to send out "feelers" in order to sense the public 
attitude. All this is legitimate, and contributes 
toward sound results. But to be inaccessible to the 
press is virtually political suicide, and the public 
should rejoice in this fact. In a long and vital 
public career, Theodore Roosevelt never refused to 
see newspaper men. He rarely refused to tell them 
all he knew, though much of what he might tell 
was confidential, and it is no exaggeration to say 
that every newspaper man who ever came in con- 
tact with Roosevelt not only respected him but 
loved him. It is a great man who can be a hero to 
reporters. 

In addition to developing a close contact between 
business men and the newspapers of the country, 
there is a great need in the American business world 
today of one or more strong, vigorously edited and 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 235 

widely read weekly journals of applied economics. 
We are happily getting away from the days when 
financial and trade papers were started largely for 
the advertising they could get, and when comments 
and criticisms in such journals were governed 
largely by the presence or absence in the advertis- 
ing pages of the companies discussed. The tradi- 
tion of the locked door between the advertising 
department and the editorial department is one of 
the most salutary and necessary unwritten laws of 
American journalism, and it is to the great interest 
of leaders of opinions that this tradition should be 
maintained in the most rigid manner. We need 
journals of opinion that are fearless and at the same 
time constructive, and it is the duty of business 
men to support journals which rigidly adhere to 
these principles and to support them with ad- 
vertising without expecting editorial support in 
return. 

At present the technical field is well covered. 
The economic and financial fundamentals are ac- 
curately and diligently set forth, but we still have 
some distance to go before the American standard 
of weekly business and economic journalism in the 
broadest sense achieves the standards of certain 
French and British weeklies. One of the objects 
to be obtained is a real national circulation, so that 
the varied geographic differences which characterize 
the American business problem in different sec- 
tions of the country may be welded into a national 



236 THE NEW FRONTIER 

policy. The excellent magazine of the Chamber of 
Commerce of the United States has taken an im- 
portant step in this direction, but in addition there 
is room for an independent and constructive journal 
which is national in viewpoint, which can discuss 
the problems of labor and capital with equal ab- 
sence of the suspicion of class bias. 

A half dozen years ago an experiment was tried 
by The Economic World, one of the smaller economic 
weeklies, which has for years maintained the high- 
est standards of independence and able editorship, 
with almost no capital. Its influence is with a 
small and select group; and it exemplifies a tre- 
mendous economic loss for a paper of this kind to 
go to the eff'ort necessary to get special articles 
from leaders of thought, for an audience number- 
ing a few thousand, when it should appeal to a 
few hundred thousand. 

This paper attempts to draw together in its 
weekly issues the best thought available in the 
country, based on sound economic thinking, com- 
bined with actual contact with practical affairs. 
One of its early articles was written by George W. 
Perkins, entitled "Economics New versus Eco- 
nomics Old," which brought out the constructive 
point of view of a man associated with big business. 
In this article the following passage occurred: "Is 
it not just possible that in place of repressive legis- 
lation, what has been and is needed is permissive 
legislation, wkh restrictions that will safeguard the 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 237 

people from the avarice of unscrupulous men? The 
people must be satisfied that centralized power will 
not be abused in future as it has been in the past. 
I believe a solution of this problem must come largely 
through the setting up in this country of some other 
standard of reward than that of the almighty 
dollar — some other mark of distinction than the 
number of millions a man is worth. The yard 
stick of wealth as the measure of a man's worth 
must give way to the yard stick of service. Our 
industrial system must be such that a man holding 
a high business position will be held in high esteem 
as a pubhc servant, receiving two kinds of pay: 
his reward in money and his reward in honors, 
both in exchange for service actually rendered. 
Publicity, full and frank, will be potential in es- 
tablishing such a system." 

The article then goes on to elaborate upon the 
importance of pubhcity. "The larger our industrial 
concerns and the greater the power of individuals, 
the more searching must be the measure of pubhcity 
required of them by law and the stronger and 
more constant must be the limelight on their every 
action. The law of pubhcity is about the only law 
governing the President of the United States, to 
whom the people give vast power. They can af- 
ford to give him this power because everything he 
does, every move he makes, every word he utters, 
almost every change of countenance is watched, 
recorded, and publicly interpreted. It would be im- 



238 THE NEW FRONTIER 

possible to have any code of laws minutely de- 
fining the power of the President that could possibly 
be as effective as the power of publicity which con- 
stantly regulates and controls him. What better 
precedent could we have for the regulation and 
control of our semi-public servants in our great 
industrial world?" 

1 his article involved a sincere piece of con- 
structive thinking and it attracted such general at- 
tention that it was reprinted to the extent of several 
hundred thousand copies and circulated through 
the United States, with the result that the editor 
received letters from men in all groups of our busi- 
ness and industrial life, including professors of 
economics and leaders in labor organizations, and 
an attitude distinctly American, rather than an un- 
American or class attitude was hinted at. Further 
articles were obtained, from professors of economics 
and heads of corporations; in short it was a labora- 
tory experiment in applied economics, the economics 
of the study checked up with the economics of the 
market place so that there was left no question as 
to the need and value of such work done on a large 
scale and continued year after year. The con- 
clusion borne home upon those who were active in 
this experiment carried on over a period of two 
years is that a journal which can interpret to America 
the spirit of business men and provide a forum for 
the frank discussion of their problems will find a 
powerful and interesting career for itself in this 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 239 

country. But the venture calls for substantial 
capital placed at the unrestricted use of a capable 
and unbiased stafF. 

Although the facts of the modern world are widely- 
told, it is still true that half the world does not know 
what the other half thinks. Rarely have we had a 
majority of the people in favor of any one specific 
thing at any one time in this country. Professor 
Channing in his "History of the United States" 
says that perhaps less than half of the American 
people wanted to separate from England at the 
time of the American Revolution. Probably less 
than half of the American people favored total 
prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Yet the Revo- 
lution was right. The nation is now wondering if 
absolute prohibition is right. 

The lesson we may draw from this would seem 
to be that the leaders must be careful in what di- 
rection they lead. They must be careful what they 
say for pubHcation; but when they do talk they 
must express their own honest views; and when 
they see views expressed which they know to be 
unsound they must not hesitate to express views to 
the contrary. When we have this magnificent and 
powerful pubHcity machinery at the disposal of 
the nation it rests with the leaders to lead so that 
matters that are right may be eflTected quickly and 
that movements which are not right may be checked 
before they go so far as to get themselves on the 
statute books and put the people to the pain, con- 



240 THE NEW FRONTIER 

fusion and, above all, the expense that follows ex- 
perimentation with glittering novelties conceived by 
unthinking enthusiasts and carried through to a 
temporarily successful conclusion because of the 
apathy and inertia of men and women who know 
better. If, with this tremendous publicity ma- 
chinery ready at hand, and the methods of arous- 
ing and organizing sound and irresistible public 
support so clearly available for those who want to 
study them, the leaders of American thought con- 
tinue to be too busy to think and act and talk on 
public questions and leave it to agitators to sow 
the seeds of Bolshevism among the people of this 
country, they have only themselves to blame should 
they reap the bitter harvest of anarchy. 

For two can play at this game. False teachers 
can be just as good at organization and publicity as 
true teachers, and it may be added that the radical 
propagandists have a much easier time than the 
liberals or the conservatives, because radical, revo- 
lutionary and subversive doctrines can much more 
readily be presented in a way which will arrest at- 
tention and tickle the interests of those whose 
thoughts are dominated by their feelings. But in 
opposition to this, the liberal leaders have on their 
side sanity and common sense to appeal to the 
sounder elements of the community, which will 
always be in America the most numerous elements. 
And the challenge of liberal leadership is nowhere 
stronger than when it calls upon the writers and 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 241 

organizers of the future to present common sense 
in as compelling and inspiring a form as that in 
which the radicals sometimes clothe nonsense. Let 
us not leave all the cleverness to the radicals — 
and let us not underestimate them. But cleverness 
or no cleverness, we must rely more upon thinking 
and less upon phrase-making. Along the stony road 
of thought in a day when there is no end of books 
to read and speakers to listen to, when there is no 
limit to reforms and campaigns and movements 
and undertakings requiring clear thinking and dis- 
crimination, it is little wonder that people are 
lured aside by the soft music of generalization and 
the fairy architecture of mere words. 

Phrases in themselves are not the evil com- 
plained of. The evil lies in false ideas or half- 
truths set up in the tinkling form of slogans. Great 
phrases have always been powerful in influencing 
public opinion and determining action. Men and 
women have an inherent love of symbols, but the 
danger of symbols is that they may conceal rather 
than epitomize the truth. 

Americans have been particularly susceptible to 
the power of slogans. In the days of the War of 
Independence men talked glibly about "no taxa- 
tion without representation" when as a matter of 
fact the economics of the taxation argument of the 
revolutionary fathers is very hard to defend, and 
the granting by Parliament of full representation to 
colonists who hved three thousand miles away in 



242 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the days of sailing ships would have had little or no 
influence in permanently checking the swelling im- 
pulse towards liberty in the hearts of the American 
colonists. During the War of 1812, in spite of the 
fact that England was very heavily occupied with 
her neighbors in Europe, the young Americans 
could make very little progress with their war until 
finally Lawrence in a sea fight gave utterance to 
the immortal phrase, "Don't give up the ship!" 
This dogged command connoted victory, although 
the Chesapeake, which Lawrence commanded, was a 
more powerful man-of-war than the British Shannon 
which destroyed and sank the American ship. But 
this slogan did more than any facts to stimulate the 
enthusiasm and confidence of the American public. 
Just before the Civil War great phrases filled the 
air. "The multitude took no pains to argue out 
the que tion as to what the fathers had intended or 
what the Constitution allowed and what it forbade. 
A few burning phrases served as watchwords and 
war-cries, and were accepted as statements not to 
be gainsaid. The wraiths of Jackson and Webster 
hovered in the air. 'The union shall and must 
be preserved,' 'Liberty and union, now and forever, 
one and inseparable.' . . . 'If any man attempts to 
haul down the American flag, shoot him on the 
spot.*'* During the Oregon controversy the rights 
of the case were obscured by the popular ultimatum 
*' Fifty-four-forty or fight." Some day we may ex- 
pect to open our own paper and read the stirring 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 243 

slogan: "Fifty-fifty or fight," and we may well 
wonder what agitator is contented with so modest 
a division of rights and profits! 

During the recent great campaigns throughout the 
country for Liberty Loan, Red Cross and other 
great national interes s, in fact during the whole 
period before and after the war, public opinion re- 
acted very fully to slogans. There has never been 
a time when so many phrases have filled the air: 
"Too proud to fight"; "Buy Liberty Bonds"; 
"He kept us out of war"; "Make the world safe 
for democracy"; "Finish the job." 

Even more remarkable in our modern life than 
the use of slogans is the use of trade-marks and 
symbols. We are as susceptible to picture writing 
as were the ancient Egyptians. We are as de- 
pendent upon symbols as were the Arabians who 
devised the system of numerals which we use today. 
Nabisco, W.S.S., Uneeda, B.V.D., the Gold Dust 
Twins, the Dutch Cleanser girl, are known to every- 
one. Even great men are sometimes dlibbed, 
through popular affection and the limitations under 
which the headline writers of the newspapers must 
work, with abbreviated sobriquets. The whole 
world knew what "T. R." stood for. All over the 
country a few pictures influence the course of voting 
in thousands of elections. As the New York Glohe 
humorously observes: "Even our ballots remind us 
that the days of political symbols are not yet past 
and that if we have not the red rose and the white 



244 THE NEW FRONTIER 

to fight over we have arms with torches, stars, 
eagles, and other pictorial battle cries about which 
to rally. The voter need not take the pains to 
ascertain whether Hannibal Simkins is the man for 
whom, as a loyal Republicrat, he ought to vote. 
He has but to note whether Simkins and the rest 
of the names on which he is tempted to linger are 
preceded by the mystic sign of the couchant alligator. 
In his odd moments he may read a great deal, but 
when he finds himself in a tight little booth, with the 
fate of the commonwealth actually in his hands, 
reading may not come easy. With what relief, 
then, he catches sight of the picture. A list of 
names, a platform, even a principle, one may for- 
get, but who will forget that he has been taught to 
mark with an X every name preceded by the por- 
trait of an oyster or a cow or a hippopotamus or a 
baseball bat or a piano or a houn' dog? And how 
much the American party system has depended upon 
the symbolism of the elephant and the donkey, how 
much upon the art of the cartoonist, cannot easily 
be overestimated." 

Phrases and symbols are necessary in days of 
war when great results must be accomplished 
quickly. It was impossible to bring to the under- 
standing of a hundred miUion people in a few 
weeks elaborate and logical explanations covering 
every point upon which the immediate assistance of 
the public was demanded, but while great leaders 
will facilitate their causes if they have the ability 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 245 

to invent striking phrases which embody the heart 
of current issues, there is serious danger to our 
people in the development of the pigeon-hole habit 
of mind, each compartment tagged with a neat 
phrase into which all their conclusions are laid 
away out of reach of any possible contact with 
thought and analysis. 

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the great phrase 
makers of our time, and yet he realized the danger 
of phrases. "It behooves our people," he said, 
*' never to fall under the thraldrom of names and 
least of all to be led by designing people who appeal 
to the preference for, or antipathy toward, a given 
name in order to achieve some alien purpose. Of 
course such misuse of names is as old as the history 
of what we understand when we speak of civilized 
mankind. . . . The mob leaders usually state that 
all they are doing is necessary in order to advance 
the cause of Tiberty' while the dictator and the oli- 
garchy are usually defended on the ground that the 
cause they follow is absolutely necessary so as to 
secure * order.' Many excellent people are taken 
in by the use of the word liberty at one time and 
the use of the word order at the other, and ignore 
the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny, 
tyranny, oppression, oppression, whether committeed 
by one individual or by many individuals, by a 
state or by a private corporation." 

A fact to be noted in a discussion of the mar- 
velous modern machinery for spreading the printed 



246 THE NEW FRONTIER 

word is that it has taken the emphasis a little too 
much away from the spoken word. When we were 
a tiny republic we could all listen to our great men. 
In the great mo ements which are going to be neces- 
sary to get anything like a majority of one hundred 
milhon people to think alike for any length of time 
on any subject in the years which lie ahead, the 
printed word must be supplemented by constant, 
open discussion. The printed word is all powerful 
if rightly handled; but the spoken word is a most 
valuable ally. Indeed, if we could sit down and 
have a heart-to-heart talk with each person who is 
reached by a piece of printed propaganda the results 
would be infinitely more satisfactory. The good 
writer is constantly trying to achieve the "personal 
touch" in his story. 

In any organization for public good which the 
future may bring forth, careful consideration must 
be given to building up something more than a 
distributing agency for printed material and a 
background for news. An organization which can 
quietly extend its influence by means of small 
groups of determined men in every section of the 
country who actually get together and develop a 
full understanding of the purposes involved, and a 
burning enthusiasm for their accomplishment, will 
have the best guarantee of great achievement. 
This is something more personal even than the 
Forum movement. The history of the Round 
Table in England is a good illustration of what is 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 247 

needed, A similar organization is called for in 
America where our great distances make it so much 
harder for men in widely separated sections to get 
at the heart of each other's purposes and per- 
sonahties. 

Friendships and crusades cannot be scientifically- 
organized. But given the fundamental mutuality of 
purpose which exists among liberal-minded men in 
America today, and given the critical emergency 
which calls for national service to preserve Ameri- 
can ideals and in titutions, a form of association can 
certainly be brought about which will provide for 
an effective union of all this scattered and individual 
patriotism. Such small groups of men, mostly 
younger men, meeting regularly in every city and 
town, no group larger than fifteen, each unit made 
up of individuals of varied experience and con- 
tacts, conservative, liberal and radical, and all the 
units in communication with one another for the 
exchange of ideas, suggestions, and conclusions, 
would certainly prove a powerful stimulus for clear 
thinking. Such an American Liberal League, or 
chain of Frontier Clubs, based upon close personal 
associations of men, would form a basis for the 
swift and far-reaching operation of the more im- 
personal machinery of printed publicity; it would 
instantly add to its ring of sincerity, and stimu- 
late a quiet, steady, compelling growth of Ameri- 
canism the very opposite of the spectacular and 
superficial and somewhat evanescent sort which 



248 THE NEW FRONTIER 

sometimes attends hastily conducted campaigns of 
education. 

But whether it be the spoken word or the written 
word, the weapon of language, used for all the people, 
is going to be the determining factor in shaping the 
destinies of America, and it behooves those who 
feel a responsibility for the perpetuation of American- 
ism to enter the forum of publicity and stay there. 
They must realize they are handling dynamite. 
Just as training is needed before men can become 
soldiers and fight a winning fight, so it is advisable 
for those who would fight effectively with the 
weapons of peace to give a little study to the science 
of publicity beforehand. Experts are available. 
Advertising counselors and publicity organizers of 
an entirely new and modern stamp are coming to be 
available today to advise on these great campaigns 
of d^emocracy. But it cannot be repeated too 
often that if our men of light and leading are in 
truth to lead they cannot do it wholly by proxy. 
When the battle starts they must be at the head of 
their troops, or at least at General Headquarters, 
ready to apply to the work in hand all the resource- 
fulness and energy and enthusiasm which has won 
for them the right to leadership. It will take time; 
but it is worth it. And if the work is not done 
in this personal way, certainly five times out 
of seven it will be done imperfectly, if it is done 
at all. 

The main elements of publicity can be understood 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 249 

by almost any inquiring mind. The actual handling 
of the work is both an art and a science; a full 
ability to master the technique must be born in a 
man. And above all, there is a strange psychologi- 
cal element in the development of a great campaign 
involving popular contacts, which can only be felt. 
It can never be fully explained. It is a common ex- 
perience of those who have taken part in the guid- 
ing or shaping of public opin on through a publicity 
campaign that the answer comes ike a flash, no 
one can tell exactly when or how. A political 
campaign is on. The outcome is uncertain. A 
thousand workers think they know. The mass of 
voters say nothing. Literature appears, speeches 
are made, parades, broadsides, posters; all seems 
in confusion. What will the outcome be? 

Suddenly one morning the campaigner goes down- 
town as usual, but before long he becomes con- 
scious of something new in the air, or is it in his 
mind? At any rate it is a perfectly definite feeling 
that "things feel better" for the cause. He meets 
his friends, and strangely enough, he finds they feel 
the same way. It was so in the Liberty Loan cam- 
paigns. There always came a day, before the end 
of the campaign, when the "feel of it" was better, 
not because of the money which had come in, be- 
cause that only came in at the very end in con- 
clusive volume, but because the group of men who 
were leading the work, sensitive from long contact 
to every subtle change in the atmosphere of public 



250 THE NEW FRONTIER 

reaction, all simultaneously seemed to agree that it 
was ''going over." 

Newspaper men know this well. It is constantly 
observable in political campaigns. It was recently 
described in the New York Tribune in these words: 

"We speak of the crystallization of public senti- 
ment and opinion because that takes place also in 
the same mysterious and imperceptible way. You 
do not see the separate thoughts assume a certain 
shape and add themselves silently to the concrete 
whole. You only know that it happens by some 
law of rhythmic affinity, and that after such con- 
fusion of thought and commotion of ideas people 
suddenly become united in one sovereign emotion. 
There is no sense of the process taking place. 
There is only from time to time the realization 
that it has greatly advanced toward its com- 
pletion. ' 

Leaders of thought need to get together and check 
up their views with one another before attempting 
to apply them to public conditions. But once this 
is done the scope of our public life today urgently 
requires that our leaders should learn to use the 
highly developed machinery by means of which' the 
minds and hearts of men and women may be 
touched, so that sound views may quickly gain ac- 
ceptance and lasting support. One of the arrest- 
ing things in our vast and complicated modern life 
is the realization of how little one man can do alone. 
In all of us, perhaps, there is something of the 



THE WEAPONS OF TRUTH 251 

martyr, something of the monastic thinker who 
would commune with eternal things and give forth 
his ideas to survive or perish, as fate may decree; 
but in most men the coming of conviction is usually 
accompanied by ^ missionary zea' to go forth among 
the people and bear rigorous testimony to the 
truth and power of the vision. This is the American 
way. 

Perhaps as a nation we are inclined to express 
ourselves before our casual thoughts have had time 
to become convictions. Perhaps our endlessly pro- 
ductive mill of words and phrases is fed with more 
chaff than wheat. One of the fundamentals of 
liberal leadership in the coming age will be that we 
shall not talk first and think afterwards. And 
when this has come to pass we may for the first 
time realize to the full the outstanding glory of 
the American machinery of communication and 
popular education through the printed word. This 
organization is the most powerful the world has 
ever seen. It is the most ingenious, the most far- 
reaching, the most sensitive piece of machinery for 
moving the minds of men that the human race has 
ever developed. ^ 

It is one of the respon ibilities of modern leader- 
ship to see to it that from all proper sources infor- 
mation is available to the press. If the raw material 
of publicity is sound the product will generally be 
sound. If the fountain head is truth, the product 
will be truth. 



252 THE NEW FRONTIER 

If modern leadership will learn the proper use 
of this great machinery for giving currency to facts 
and opinions, if it will wield this great weapon 
judiciously and valiantly, the truth will prevail 
and the institutions of our fathers will endure. 



THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD 
AFFAIRS 

Through personal contacts, combined with the 
power of publicity, one of the most remarkable in- 
stances in history of a change of attitude of whole 
nations toward one another has resulted from the 
Great War. It has taken place so silently that its 
significance is scare ly realized. And yet its im- 
portance is immeasurable. It may be said today, 
for the first time, that America and England, 
America and France understand one another. It 
is beginning to be true of America and other coun- 
tries. Obviously this does not mean that these 
nations agree with one another in all things, nor 
that they may not in the future bitterly disagree. 
It does mean that the raw material of mutual 
understanding now exists to a greater degree than 
ever before. In view of the great international 
problems which face us in the yea s ahead, this ad- 
vance may well prove to be a most vital element 
in the peace of the world. 

Our fathers tell us that for many generations there 
was a decided self-consciousness on the part of 
Americans in the presence of visitors from abroad. 
It was due in part to the attitude of our foreign 

253 



254 THE NEW FRONTIER 

friends themselves, who have often failed to under- 
stand the characteristics and purposes of our people. 
Judgments were often based upon European stand- 
ards, and criticism directed at the absence of the 
fine fruits of artistic skill and inspiration. "Where 
is your Michelangelo .f* Where are your cathedrals? 
Where do you conceal your Milton and your Shake- 
speare?" They searched in vain along the banks 
of the Mississippi for a Mendelssohn or a Haydn, 
and were disappointed at the absence of a new 
Keats and a modern Dante in Boston or Phila- 
delphia. They sought personages and overlooked 
persons. Dickens weighed us and found us want- 
ing; Carlyle vigorously deplored our lack of all 
but material accomplishment. 

In a substantial way this attitude was justified. 
And it helped us. We accepted at more than its 
worth, perhaps, the estimate of Europe, and many 
Americans who failed to perceive the value of what 
America was conrributing to the world withdrew 
from our energetic midst and sought the more 
"refined" surroundings of London, Paris or Rome, 
returning at fortunately rare intervals to criticize, 
in newly acquired accents calculated to awe the 
people back home, the roughness and lack of nice 
understanding in new countries. This attitude in 
Americans is unsupportable because it is sham. 

We gained immeasurably, however, from the 
emphasis of other ideals and other standards than 
our own on the part of the heirs of the Renaissance 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 255 

and the age of Elizabeth. We do not regret nor 
do we apologize for our concentration upon the 
task of rearing a great nation across a wilderness 
of forest and prairie with speed undreamed of in 
the usual leisurely and ordered progress of civiliza- 
tion. Ours was a material task, and it naturally 
carried with it a tendency to value above their 
true worth, things tangible. But as we have come 
of age we are capable of appreciating the worth of 
other men's achievements without minimizing our 
own. 

But there was something very real underlying 
the former misunderstanding which so irritated 
our grandfathers in America. It took its place 
firmly in our national consciousness, in the phrase 
of James Russell Lowell, as "A Certain Condescen- 
sion in Foreigner ." Lowell felt there was an 
element of snobbi hness, of caste, in the point of 
view of our visitors who seemed unable to see below 
the surface and who failed to perceive the existence 
in the young American of a generous heart and a 
lofty spirit. "Every European candidly admits in 
himself some right of primogeniture in respect to 
us, and pats this shaggy continent on the back with 
a lively sense of generous unbending." 

Almost overnight this attitude has changed. 
The war has taught Europe and America how much 
they have in common. Our soldiers returned from 
France and England and Italy with a renewed love 
of America; but they left behind them most of 



256 THE NEW FRONTIER 

the false and superficial generalizations with re- 
gard to Europe which they had gathered from ill- 
founded traditions, from travelers' tales, from the 
vaudeville stage. Instead of the characteristics of 
the genus Frenchman, they learned the character 
of the brave, warm-hearted soldiers of France. At 
the same time the leaders in politics, commerce and 
finance of the various allied n tions worked together 
during a period of great strain and came to know 
and respect one another; and this mutual under- 
standing has begun to make its way into the minds 
and hearts of all the peoples of the world. 

When the war began, Americans got out their 
maps and learned for the first time where most of 
Europe really was. A mother who has puzzled out 
the position of her son's regiment near a little town 
in Fran e is not going to forget that lesson in geog- 
raphy; she will always have a more personal feel- 
ing towards the country of Lafayette. The welcome 
given in America to the Blue Devils came from 
the heart of our people; these sturdy, sunburned 
soldiers, the first body of troops we had seen who 
had been for years in the trenches our own men 
were just entering, were greeted as more than 
brothers in arms. And so it was with the Anzacs, 
the Bersaglieri, the Alpini, the Belgians, who gave 
color and vividness to the successive patriotic 
campaigns during which our people poured forth 
twenty billions of dollars to support the cause of 
democracy. We have as a people at last taken 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 257 

our place in world consciousness. We can no 
longer regard the other countries of the world as 
we should regard infinitely disconnected planets 
peopled by men and women having no more con- 
nection with our intimate life or vital destiny 
than the speculative inhabitants of Mars. 

But let us not deceive ourselves. It is pleasant 
to come to a fuller understanding with friends who 
have not understood us, and whom we have not 
understood. It is a deep satisfaction to have men 
from the lands of older cultural achievement recog- 
nize the validi y and hope in the accomplishment of 
American democracy. But we may do well to 
speak a private word of caution to each other here 
in America lest we feel that we have done more than 
we have, lest we believe that because the older 
civilization had to call upon our youthful strength 
in time of need the older civilization is bankrupt 
and all the hope of the world rests on ourselves. 
We must take care that our enthusiasm does not 
serve some European Lowell as an inspiration for 
an essay *'0n a Certain Condescension in Ameri- 
cans." 

The great opportunity of the post-war period is 
to build constructively upon the foundations of 
sympathetic understanding laid during the days of 
conflict. Various organizations are coming into 
being which have as their object to cultivate a more 
specific understanding between America and the 
countries of Europe. Much can be done along 



258 THE NEW FRONTIER 

these lines. A permanent staff, in the United States 
and in France, for example, can interpret and trans- 
\ late the poHtical, economic, social and artistic life 
of the two peoples, correct misapprehensions, find 
ways and means for the interchange of visits which 
shall not involve simply a round of formal dinners, 
but rather an opportunity of quietly getting at the 
roots of national character, and develop a true basis 
for increased friendship and cooperation frojn day 
to day, and from year to year. 

In the fall of 1919 an International Trade Confer- 
ence was held in this country under the auspices of 
the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. 
Distinguished representatives from Belgium, France, 
Great Britain and Italy were brought together with 
practical and successful representatives of Ameri- 
can business and finance. For a week these men 
sat around the table together, in small groups, 
and behind closed doors so that they could open 
their minds to one another in the frankest possible 
manner. The results were striking. The Ameri- 
can bankers and business men who came from all 
sections of the United States gained a first-hand 
knowledge of European conditions which could not 
have been obtained in any other way, and the 
European visitors absorbed the point of view of 
America and gained an insight into our own prob- 
lems, through friendly contact and the spoken 
word, which no amount of correspondence could 
have accomplished. 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 259 

Every American at that conference left with a 
deeper reahzation of the contribution to civiHza- 
tion, our civihzation, made by the AUies during 
the war, and a higher and more personal estimate of 
that important element in the credit of those na- 
tions which rests upon their record of achievement 
and sacrifice. It became a practical rather than a 
theoretical consideration that any estimate of their 
national credit must be predicated not merely upon 
the marshaling of tangible assets, but to an equal 
degree upon the element of character. In the days 
to come, if the American public is asked to invest 
in securities based upon the faith we have in the 
peoples who were our allies in France, the response 
will be influenced by the realization on the part of 
our people that America cannot long endure iF 
England, France, Belgium and Italy are swept 
away or their institutions over-turned. Our people 
realize today, as they did not at all realize in 1914, 
that the contagion of radicalism, eating away the 
foundations of law and order, and of democratic 
institutions, cannot sweep across Europe and be 
safely checked on the Eastern shores of what one 
of the French delegates to the Trade Conference 
referred to as the "Atlantic Channel." 

In 1920 it is more or less idle to debate whether 
or not we should take part in the affairs of the world. 
The fact is that we are taking part. In these days 
when the food and raw material of one country are 
necessary to feed and clothe the populations of an- 



26o THE NEW FRONTIER 

other, when the cotton of America is necessary to the 
operation of the mills of England, when the wheat of 
America is needed to prevent starvation in Europe, 
when the coal of America and Belgium and England 
is necessary to maintain the industrial life of Italy, 
when in a thousand ways one country must look to 
another, not only for its complete and well-rounded 
development, but indeed for its very existence, the 
only question we can ask ourselves with regard to 
cooperation between nations is not whether but how. 
It is an interesting and very typical American 
situation to find a great problem of this sort thrown 
upon us almost without warning. Before the war, 
the number of men in the United States who knew 
anything about foreign banking and foreign trade 
was comparatively small. A few of our great com- 
panies, like the International Harvester Company, 
the National Cash Register Company, and the 
Singer Sewing Machine Company, had an extensive 
foreign business, but previous to 1914 the Ameri- 
can manufactured goods sent abroad were hardly 
more than ten per cent of the total production. 
During the war this figure increased to more than 
thirty per cent. Even today, with the experience 
of the war behind us, we find ourselves with the 
world's major responsibility in international trade 
and finance and with comparatively fevv' men who 
have the technical knowledge necessary to handle 
these problems. Anyone who has made the slight- 
est study of foreign exchange and other phases 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 261 

of international trade knows that it requires gen- 
erations of study, experience and tradition to 
develop a body of men who are world experts. 
The British, the French and the Belgians have 
looked upon international trade as one of the es- 
sential features of their national existence for 
generation after generation and have developed men 
who know international credit and finance as the 
watchmaker knows the inside of a watch. 

We cannot accompHsh this result in a day; and 
here we are thrown back to some extent on our 
American self-reliance and ingenuity, on the frontier 
spirit, which is such a predominant element in the 
shaping of American character. It is not a question, 
therefore, of whether we are fully equipped to 
handle this job. It is a piece of work which we must 
handle; and judging from many previous American 
experiences, men may be found who will accomplish 
results which do not now seem possible. 

Perhaps it is fair to say that our understanding 
of the European character is easier than a full ap- 
preciation on the part of European peoples of the 
essentials of Americanism. On our part, the ht- 
erature we read as children expresses the atmos- 
phere of European traditions and institutions. Our 
roots are in the soil of our forefathers; their blood 
flows in our veins. Here is the stuff, certainly, 
out of which understanding can grow. But how 
can Europeans measure by their standards the 
rapid development of America, the continental ex- 



262 THE NEW FRONTIER 

perience shaping our achievements and our dreams? 
It is more difficult; but it is not impossible, because 
there is nothing incomprehensible or magical in 
the elements of American character, but rather a 
new application under new skies of the qualities 
which have appeared and re-appeared through the 
ages — among the tribes of Israel, in Athens, in 
Sparta, among the legions of Philip of Macedon, in 
the armies of Caesar and the assemblies of the 
Roman Forum, among the Northern Goths in the 
primeval forests of Germany, among the Gauls, 
the Venetians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Danes, 
the Scots and the Britons. 

Wherever men have had to contend against the 
ruggedness of nature, the forest, the prairie or the 
open sea, this struggle has left a deep and lasting 
impression. It has been perhaps the greatest single 
determinant of national character. On this is built 
the accomplishment of a people, influenced by 
wars and invasions and the interplay of ideas, until 
we see emerging a national identity, with a flavor, 
an atmosphere, a language, even a cast of counte- 
nance and a physical carriage, which distinguishes 
individuals as French, Italian, Spanish, English, 
American. 

The American is coming to be understood abroad, 
to a large extent in France, and naturally, perhaps, 
best of all in England. There have recently been 
published three books by British authors which give 
evidence of an appreciation of the American char- 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 263 

acter which is equal to any self-interpretation we 
have ever achieved. Frederick Oliver's Alexander 
Hamilton analyzes the federal principle upon which 
our national policy is based. Col. Henderson's 
Stonezvall Jackson is the best Civil War biography 
we have; and the latest of the three, Lord Charn- 
wood's Abraham Lhicoln is written with a profound 
sympathy and insight into the true heart of our 
people. It is hard to understand how a foreigner 
could have accomplished this result. Perhaps the 
answer is that the foreign perspective made it pos- 
sible. Every day the word "foreigner" carries less 
and less of the old implication of ignorance and lack 
of appreciation of the conditions and peoples be- 
yond the four walls of his own home. It is a further 
extension of the principle which made possible 
Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," Motley's 
"Dutch Repubhc," Gibbon's "Rome" and Thayer's 

Lavour. 
' But few strangers have so fully reached the heart 
of a land not their own as has Lord Charnwood. 
In a recent issue of the Anglo-French Review he has 
ventured a little further into an analysis of the 
American spirit. He has set up a standard of na- 
tional character analysis which challenges those 
Americans whose privilege it may be in the future 
to interpret for us our British friends. First of all 
the author defines for Englishmen and Frenchmen 
the word "new" as applied to America: "I have 
spoken of the United States as a new country. In 



264 THE NEW FRONTIER 

a way it is well to remember that the epithet 'new' 
so applied is in some respects misleading and ab- 
surd. The United States as a national power is of 
course older than the Kingdom of Italy, still older 
than the late German Empire. The American 
Constitution of today is a little older than the real 
working British Constitution of today, however 
much the antiquity of King, Lords, and Commons, 
severally, may disguise this fact. The American 
nation moreover has by now a sufficient length of 
history behind it — of history peculiarly rich in 
romance, in dramatic events, and in heroic figures 
— to do away with any sense on the part of others 
that its life lacks the background of antiquity, and 
if it lives in a constant state of transition, so too is 
it with ourselves. But in one sense the word 'new' 
applied to the United States stands for an important 
fact — a fact common to them and to the Overseas 
Dominions. Their pohtical and social community 
was the creation of a number of men who came to- 
gether in a field theretofore untrodden by their 
race, steeped as individuals in the traditions of an 
older community, but surrounded, then and thence 
forward to this day, by circumstances wholly unlike 
those which have ever prevailed in any country of 
Europe. Therefore, the untraveled Englishman or 
Frenchman who wishes to understand America 
must once for all imagine vividly the difference of 
circumstances which all along has governed or con- 
ditioned the development of America." 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 265 

Lord Charnwood goes on to analyze some of the 
elements which peculiarly contributed to form the 
American character, and refers first of all to the 
influence of the frontier: "Among those conditions 
of American life to which I have just referred, the 
most important historically is the persistent in- 
fluence of the frontier. It is easy for English 
people to imagine individual life on the confines of 
civilization, since the British Empire has more 
frontiers to it than any other state that ever existed, 
but, living as we normally do in this crowded and 
fully developed island, it needs effort for us to 
realize the collective efi^ect of this condition upon 
a society of which, from the beginning till a very 
recent date, a large and very vigorous portion has 
lived upon what still was, or had been yesterday, 
the frontier. Frontier life involved a certain en- 
forced equality; it meant for all, prevalent hard- 
ships and frequent calls upon resourcefulness and 
exertion; it meant for the great mass, the fair prom- 
ise of solid prosperity; for a considerable number, 
the chance of enormous gains, or of a corresponding 
failure which had in it a certain element of pictur- 
esqueness or romance. It meant a high standard of 
individual independence and competence, a general 
indifference to a government which, as a rule, was 
apt to be remote and only spasmodically efficient, 
but it meant too, in the presence of occasional 
danger, the power of sudden, irresistible, and some- 
times tyrannical combination. 



266 THE NEW FRONTIER 

*'It meant the tolerance of much that was both 
novel and crude, and the slightly unreasonable 
veneration of such established things as could be 
conserved. It involved that preoccupation of the 
strongest minds and of the public generally with 
problems which could be stated in dollars, which 
resulted in the delusive phenomenon once known 
both in America and in Europe as American ma- 
terialism. In a thousand particulars it carried with 
it what may be best described as the absence of a 
high general standard in judging of all sorts of 
things, from a steam engine to a sermon, and trom 
a boiled egg to a poem. 

"And all the while it preserved, and in preserv- 
ing continuously developed, high types of manhood 
and of womanhood, cherishing 'things true, pure, 
lovely and of good report,' not less discerningly 
than was common with us, nor any less passionately, 
but probably more so. 

"It would not be very hard in a lengthy treatise 
to exhibit the surprising potency of this frontier 
influence and of other influences — more especially 
that of vast distances — which can barely be 
glanced at here. It is enough to say that though 
frontier life has gone, other influences somewhat 
analogous continue or even increase. America is 
still a country with vast resources very imperfectly 
developed. It is still a country whose settled in- 
habitants (with several generations of American 
citizenship behind them) are incessantly being in- 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 267 

vaded by immigrant hordes, formerly of a stock 
not widely remote from their own, latterly of every 
people, nation, and language in Europe. The 
problem, present from the first, has become of late 
more difficult than ever — that of digesting into 
the American Commonwealth, when its own life 
had hardly yet taken settled shape, these huge 
ahen masses. To realize the difficulties with which 
the now great nation has had to wrestle in its growth, 
is to feel at once that what have been reckoned as 
its glaring defects are natural; but it is a good deal 
more. It is to begin to see in them something very 
insignificant, and to see in the building of the 
American nation one of the most interesting and 
cheerful pages in human history." 

The article concludes with an estimate of the 
greatness of America and an appraisal of the ele- 
ments of danger to civilization which may lurk 
behind it: *' America as a nation has a peculiar 
greatness quite other than that which the untraveled 
Englishman or Frenchman would impute to it. 
It is not solely the greatness of mechanical and 
business efficiency — indeed in these respects Ameri- 
cans may not be so eminent as we often suppose — 
but it is that of a country in which quiet but strenu- 
ously devoted movement in all the more important 
directions of progress — moral, intellectual, in a 
word spiritual — is more widely stirring than it 
appears to be in any other country of the world. 
It matters relatively little that few American places 



268 THE NEW FRONTIER 

of learning have quite the standard of general at- 
tainment which exists in the universities of the 
Old World (or perhaps those of Canada); it matters 
much that they are striving after it, that meanwhile 
a vastly greater proportion of their people come 
within the influence of learning, and that an unusual 
harmony between the liberal and the merely techni- 
cal studies is beginning to appear. It matters 
little that snobs and nouveaux riches are as common 
and conspicuous in America as with us; it matters 
much that over far the greater part of the country 
there prevails a greater equality and ease of ap- 
proach between man and man, based on self-respect 
and respect for others, than in any other large 
human society. The puzzling peculiarities of Ameri- 
can politics matter little beside the relative security 
that, in the long run and in the largest matters, 
*the common sense of most' is going to prevail. 
It matters little that there lingers in America a 
certain flavor of cant of which the excessive itera- 
tion of the world 'idealism' may seem to Europeans 
symptomatic; it matters much that the aspiration 
to build a new human society founded on human 
right was genuinely present with the chief of the 
American 'fathers,' that it never quite died out, and 
possesses probably a more sane and powerful driv- 
ing force today than ever before. 

"Our impoverished peoples may look with a 
certain natural repining on the dominant position 
which for the future seems assured to the nation 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 269 

which entered last into the fight for human right 
and, however devotedly it entered, emerged from 
it hardly scathed. But is the huge power which for 
a while at least resides in that nation a menace to 
the world, as German power was and as French 
and even Eng ish power has at times seemed likely 
to become? It needs but little acquaintance with 
America to assure us that about that we need not 
worry ourselves at all. The country of which this 
can be said is entitled to pride itself on a hitherto 
unexampled form of glory, due indeed in great 
measure to the singularly favoring circumstances 
under which it has grown, but due none the less to 
the persistent cherishing by faithful persons in 
America of a great tradition." , j 

In these words, indeed, we may have the keen 
satisfaction of seeing ourselves as others see us. 
This student from overseas has perceived in the 
vastness of America a clear, definable and univer- 
sally comprehensible element which he can interpret 
to the world. We know it as Americanism. It is 
a basic love of the square deal, of fair play; it is a 
love, sometimes submerged in the show and bustle 
of twentieth century achievement, of rugged sim- 
plicity both of living and of character. It is a de- 
sire to "get the facts," to get at the heart of things. 
It is a conviction that our institutions are sound, 
and sufficiently elastic to be adapted to all the de- 
mands of a changing world. We have no monopoly 
of these qualitiesj but we as a people are fortunate 



270 THE NEW FRONTIER 

in having lived through a century during which 
these quahties were essential to the very existence 
of our race. Insofar, therefore, as we can apply 
these principles in the new era to our own domestic 
problems of capital and labor and to other vital 
issues of the day, we may well expect to have dem- 
onstrated the right of the word American to take 
its place in history beside the word Greek as connot- 
ing something eternal, something more enduring in 
the progress of human happiness than the greatest 
railway system or the tallest building in thegtworld. 

It is true that the tradition of America has been 
one of great material achievement and activity. 
But it is not a tradition of selfishness. Our people 
have been deeply patriotic, but they have opened 
their gates as no other nation in recorded history 
has done to the peoples of the world flocking in 
millions to enjoy our freedom and opportunity. 
Our Americanism arouses itself at the first provoca- 
tion to defend its essential elements from destructive 
anarchy or weak internationalism, both of which 
would let every drop of red blood out of the veins 
of the national body politic. But because a man 
has a deep love for his own family, does this preclude 
his living in peace and friendly and active coopera- 
tion with his neighbors ? 

In this connection we may recall once more the 
words of Lincoln: "It was the sentiment in the 
Declaration of Independence which gave liberty 
not alone to the people of this country but, I 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 271 

hope, to the world for all future time. It was that 
which gave promise that in due time the weight 
should be hfted from the shoulders of all men." 
Does not even our most intense nationalism lead 
naturally and inevitably toward the full participa- 
tion by a vigorous and united people in the affairs 
of a world closely bound together by constantly 
strengthening ties of opportunity and responsibility? 

It is doubtless true that when America was 
drawn into world affairs in 191 7, the majority of 
our people had not quite adapted themselves to this 
step. It was undertaken as a necessity and under 
the stress of enthusiasm and did not at first have 
back of it the stimulus and support of the mind 
as well as the support of sentiment. Now that the 
war is over, many Americans are falling an easy 
prey to a doctrine of "America First," which has 
a very definite implication of "America Only." 
The natural reaction from a sudden and tremendous 
plunge into international affairs has made some of 
us susceptible to arguments of a distinctly pro- 
vincial character. i 

This is not a matter for bitterness, because those 
who would have us seek safety and quiet in our 
own house, and slam the door in the face of the world, 
are appealing to a very human element in our 
character. But on a basis of fact it must be clear 
that the modern economic structure is international 
in scope. Politically we cannot remain comfort- 
ably isolated even if we desire to. Not only the 



272 THE NEW FRONTIER 

history of the recent war but the entire course of 
American history indicate that this nation cannot 
Hve a purely self-centered existence. Peace among 
individuals or nations is not to be built upon isola- 
tion and lack of reciprocity. 

An appeal has been made, no doubt in good 
faith, to the rugged Americanism of the era of de- 
mocracy and the opening of the West, and it is 
implied that in the years following the Revolution, 
Americans committed themselves to a policy of 
isolation from all European contacts, that as the 
nation swept westward it left farther and farther 
behind any community of interest, spiritual or 
material, with Europe. Professor Turner has been 
asked to interpret the present situation from a 
historical point of view. His analysis is of sufficient 
significance to merit wider distribution than is 
possible in personal correspondence, and is printed 
here with his permission. 

After dwelling on the impossibility of a purely 
selfish nationalism in the present condition of the 
world, he writes, ''The Western movement, as I see 
it, contained at least two factors that affect the 
problem. One is the obvious, but in the long run, 
superficial and secondary fact, that it took our 
attention away from world problems during the 
period between 1815 and the end of the 19th century 
especially, and centered our interest and our efforts 
upon colonizing and developing our own back 
country, with a resultant self-contained economic 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 273 

and political life, self-sufficing during that period. 
But there was, even in those years, much more 
European influence seeping in, by immigration, by 
the inflow of ideas, by economic currents, thajn is 
sometimes realized. 

"However, from a narrow viewpoint this factor 
tended to emphasize the ideal of continuous isola- 
tion, as a Western conception; although even while 
we held to the Monroe Doctrine and objected to 
the use of European experience, we at times grew 
enthusiastic over carrying American ideals of de- 
mocracy and freedom to Europe, as witness the 
agitation of "Young America" in the days of the 
Revolution of 1848, a movement in which Douglas's 
name was prominent. There are many other evi- 
dences that Western expansion ideals were not 
narrow. 

"The other factor was that of change, of adapta- 
tion of old institutions and ideals to new conditions. 
The West was ready to *try anything once.' It wasn't 
bound by hard and fast traditions and conventions. 
It looked forward to new and broader creations in 
society and the state, and it conceived of itself 
as a part of the process of making a better humanity. 
These two aspects of the matter, — the responsive- 
ness to innovation, and the courageous ideal of in- 
fusing American conceptions into the world order — 
both work for acceptance of the great experiment of 
a League of Nations. 

"Some leaders today act on the old-time prin- 



274 THE NEW FRONTIER 

ciples of the sectional Federalists, who distrusted 
American power to introduce a new system, who 
based their action upon sectional and class preju- 
dices. 'Innovation' always spelled with a capital 
*I,' and figured as 'Stalking' was a dangerous 
thing to them. Their conservatism was more than 
the reasonable opposition to revolutionary destruc- 
tiveness; it was distrust of America's own power to 
make contributions and to play a part among the 
nations of the earth, standing as an equal among 
equals. It was colonial timidity as much as it was 
provincial pride. 

*'The frontier worked both to create a new and 
broader American conception of society and of the 
dignity and possibility of the common man, and it 
worked toward a readiness to adjust itself to new 
conditions and a courageousness In applying and 
extending American ideals. Having occupied the 
continent the next logical step was to transfer the 
m.ovement of the American frontier to the larger 
area of world ideals and world intercourse, without 
undue timidity In respect to America's capacity to 
participate in the reconstructive process. 

"Personally I have always felt that unless the 
League developed beyond Its present form It would 
fail of Its largest usefulness, precisely as our Union 
would have failed If It had relied upon diplomatic 
councils Instead of legislative action by chosen repre- 
sentatives of the people, with parties behind the 
leaders, — parties which in composition ajid in- 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 275 

terests ran across sections. In America our party 
system has been like a rubber band, flexible enough 
to respond to sectional or state interests, at the same 
time that it steadily pulled together for national 
concert of action. 

"In the present international situation there is an 
unrepresented body of common interests among the 
mass of people in all these countries, and a dislike 
of war. The foundations of the old order are 
giving way to new social construction. The League 
doesn't give sufficient opportunit}^ for the play of 
these new forces. The forces are perfectly con- 
sistent with adequate recognition of separate na- 
tional interests. In the play between the forces of 
nationalism and social sympathy on an international 
scale will be the opportunity for the preservation 
of a balanced liberty. If the Western experience 
taught anything it was the possibility of progress 
by adjustments, by compromise and mutual con- 
cession, by open-mindedness toward social and 
political experimentation, by the creative rather 
than the crystallizing processes. 

"The League Is the half-loaf. The whole loaf 
isn't yet obtainable — but with what it contains we 
can develop it in response to changing conditions. 
The alternative is a world of warring nations and 
classes." 

The freedom of American life is a heritage which 
can safely be shared with peoples whose opportunity 
for self-realization has not been equal to our own. 



276 THE NEW FRONTIER 

They are looking to us today, not simply to bask 
in our good fortune, but to discharge a public service 
to mankind. The war has left us the trustee for 
the aspiration of the world, as well as for the sanity 
of the world. Endless instances could be cited of 
disinterested foreign opmion emphasizing this view- 
point. One of the most recent is copied here from 
a brief address made by Mr, Wilhelm Morgenstierne, 
formerly of the Norwegian Legation in Washing- 
ton who understands and loves America, who 
knows us because he has lived for years in our cities 
and traveled on foot over much of our most char- 
acteristic country. He says: 

"What is the essence of this American spirit? 

*'We see it, we feel its presence everywhere we go 
in the United States, — even we who are perhaps 
only visitors of a short time. 

"I shall not here try to undertake any analysis: 
— but is it not true that we all have a feeling of the 
promise of American life? Is not this American 
spirit a spirit of optimism, of confident faith in the 
ultimate destinies of the human race, — and of the 
American people in particular? I think that per- 
haps we shall realize this more clearly when we con- 
sider the future. 

"America, — does it not stand in our imag^rration 
intimately bound up with the future of the world? 
Can we conceive of that future without America ? — 

"We have gone through a terrible experience. 
The foundations of civilization have been shaken 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN WORLD AFFAIRS 277 

and we are groping in the dark. It seems hard to 
find our bearings. But we all feel this, that if the 
nations of the world are to endure, the near future 
must see a radical and far-reaching extension of the 
principles of equality and liberty. 

"And so we all turn our eyes Westward and we 
get the vision of a vast and wonderful country 
stretching in tremendous expanse from ocean to 
ocean, with the intense, husthng life of its great 
cities, the vastness and the desolation of its prairies, 
the towering beauty of its mountains and the 
majesty of its forests. We have seen it, — and it 
has become part of us, — and we love it. 

"The world is waiting breathlessly for leadership. 
And millions in all lands look West, to the nation 
dedicated to the high principles of the Declaration 
of Independence, to take the lead. Will she do it? 
Many, many are those who fondly hope that she 
will, that she will show the way in carrying to their 
jujst and necessary — and tremendously difficult — • 
conclusion, the great living ideals of equality and 
liberty." 

This is a summons we cannot ignore. It is not 
inconsistent with "the persistent cherishing by 
faithful persons in America of a great tradition." 
The tradition of America has been as broad as 
civilization itself. The blood of a score of races 
runs in our veins. We are an integral and insep- 
arable part of the progress of the world. We can- 
not hope to amalgamate the millions who have 



278 THE NEW FRONTIER 

come to us from other lands unless we make a place 
in our national policy for a deep interest in the wel- 
fare and happiness of the neighbors overseas with 
whom we fought side by side, with whom we are 
entering a vast friendly commercial rivalry, who 
cannot suffer without influencing us deeply. 

In days of stress there comes a weariness of the 
spirit, and with it a longing for the simpler days 
and less intricate problems of our young and more 
Isolated republic. But the world has grown and 
we have grov^n with it. Its problems challenge us, 
and our answer comes inevitably out of a bold and 
courageous past which never hesitated to meet its 
problems more than halfway. There are no desert 
sands in America for ostriches to hide their heads 
in. We are ready to face the world we live in, and 
meet face to face whatever sacrifice the future may 
have in store. If we attempt with words to deny 
the existence of a world problem, if we do not go 
forward valiantly to play our part as a strong, in- 
dividual and self-reliant nation, the tide of affairs 
in its inexorable advance will overwhelm us. 

We must build a stronger America not for selfish- 
ness but for service. That is our task today. It is 
essentially a patriotic task. It may prove to be the 
basis of the continued existence of the institutions 
and the traditions for which our fathers lived and 
died, which we have too often taken for granted, 
but which deep down in our hearts we, too, love — 
for which if need be we, too, will die. 



THE NEW FRONTIER 

The frontier played a significant part in our 
history. It was not the only vital influence in the 
shaping of the American nation and the character 
of our people; but it was a fundamental influence, 
and one easil comprehended. The more subtle and 
controversial elements in our annals are hardly 
useful as guides and sources of inspiration to the 
average man. 

This influence has been emphasized here because 
in actual experience over a period of years it has 
proved to be increasingly absorbing and practically 
helpful. It appears in daily life in a surprising 
variety of forms. It serves to explain much in 
the current aff*airs of the country which would 
otherwise be incomprehensible. i 

In approaching the problems of each succeeding 
day we in America need not be without precedents, 
although the precedents are not specific as to detail. 
The new day presents its difficulties in ever fresh 
disguises, but the fundamentals are the same as 
those in which our fathers trusted. The spirit of 
self-reliance and abounding optimism, which brought 
success to them may help to bring success to us. 
Our youth should know this. A man who leaves 

279 



28o THE NEW FRONTIER 

an American school or college today without a deep 
pride in his country, a firm confidence in the part 
he is to play in its future, lacks perhaps the greatest 
asset of a worker in the broader field of business 
or public life. 

This spirit, which we have chosen to associate 
with the frontier, which we refer to as liberal or 
practical in its contact with the work of the world, 
is, in practice, the effective result-getting spirit in 
the arena of active affairs. It is not the only 
manifestation of Americanism. It happens to be 
a fact that our ancestors, on a series of perplexing 
frontiers, were confronted by an intensely material 
problem. The spirit of the modern frontier naturally 
inherits much of the temperament and tendency of 
its predecessors, but it has absorbed much besides. 
Because it is, like the old frontier, keenly conscious 
of its surroundings, wide and catholic in its contacts, 
there are many aspects of our modern problem which 
had no counterpart in the life on the Ohio or in 
the forests of Kentucky. 

And yet the spirit is the same. A struggling 
artist with a vision can put the same resolution and 
self-confidence into his work as the pioneer in a 
prairie schooner slowly creeping toward the West. 
The musician, the poet, the diplomat, the politician, 
the teacher, the clergyman, may find the same 
source of inspiration in this record of stern sacri- 
fice and noble achievement as can the banker or 
the business man or the farmer whose customary 



THE NEW FRONTIER 281 

objectives are more closely akin to those of the 
men of the Western waters. 

This is the important point. In a discussion of 
this sort no attempt can be made to analyze in 
detail American institutions or their history. But 
the experience of most young men is that they can 
get the facts if they once have a purpose in mind to 
which to apply the facts. The objective, the spirit 
of achievement — these are the great things. Some 
critics have said that one of the outstanding dif- 
ficulties with the organization of industry and 
political society today is the very fact that, with a 
growing popular intelligence, too few people have 
been taught the true objects of industry, or the 
true goal of political effort. Hence their work is 
too often formal and spiritless. 

It is manifestly impossible to expect every unit in 
a great organization to know its purposes in detail. 
But in a broad way the underlying purposes, and 
the spirit in which those purposes are being sought, 
can be comprehended by all. If these are under- 
stood, if the leadership inspi es respect, and the goal 
is one toward which men can work with confidence, 
a basis is established for that same cheerful, and 
irresistible^ progress of the doughboys in France who 
sang "We don't know where we're going, but we're 
on our way." In other words, what we are aiming at 
is a development of a stronger national morale by 
teaching the average soldier of peace what he is fight- 
ing for, and not simply teaching him to obey orders. 



282 THE NEW FRONTIER 

The machinery of organization and government 
cannot control the hearts of men. At best it can 
inspire their loyalty. At worst it can kill most of 
their natural aspiration and destroy that individu- 
ality which must always remain the chief attribute 
of sentient beings. The essence of the old frontier 
was its intense individualism. If we have in- 
herited anything of the traditions of the pioneers 
we have inherited that. We must preserve it. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most individualistic of 
American thinkers, has left us in his essays a last- 
ing interpretation of this element of character. 
*'0 rich and various Man!" he says, "thou palace 
of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the 
morning and the night and the unfathomable 
galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of 
God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms 
of right and wrong.'* 

Commenting upon this passage, William James 
said, in an address delivered in Concord at the 
centenary of the birth of Emerson : 

"If the individual opens thus directly into the 
Absolute, it follows that there is something in each 
and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to 
consent to borrowing traditions and living at second 
hand. *If John was perfect, why are you and I 
alive?' Emerson WTites. *As long as any man exists 
there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.' 
This faith that in a life at first hand there is some- 
thing sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note 



THE NEW FRONTIER 283 

in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is 
this non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper 
could ever verge on common irascibihty, it would 
be by reason of the passionate character of his 
feelings on this point. The world is still new and 
untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of 
what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. 
'Each one of us can bask in the great morning which 
rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of 
the children of the light. 'Trust thyself, every 
heart vibrates to that iron string.' There is a time 
in each man's education when he must arrive at 
the conviction that imitation is suicide; when he 
must take himself for better or worse as his portion; 
and know that though the wide universe is full of 
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him 
but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground 
which it was given him to till." 

This does not mean that all individuals are equal 
in strength or ability. It does not discard the 
selective processes which produce leadership among 
men. "His optimism," continues William James, 
"had nothing in common with that indiscriminate 
hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whit- 
man has made us familiar. For Emerson, the in- 
dividual fact and moment were indeed suffused 
with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition 
that saved the situation — they must be worthy 
specimens — sincere, authentic. ..." 

The individual then is our unit of discussion. 



284 THE NEW FRONTIER 

The next step brings us to the leader who has worked 
his way out of the basic equahty of men by avail- 
ing himself of the existence of opportunity. And 
opportunity is established by organization, by gov- 
ernment. The protection of mankind from the 
predatory few who appear in every age is the duty 
of organized society. We have seen that the 
American pioneers almost immediately began to 
organize the simple processes of government in the 
Western wilderness, for mutual protection, and 
inspired by loyalty to one another and to a common 
ideal. 

Government, then, involves the restriction of the 
freedom of action of the individual as a basis of the 
ordered liberty upon whom our scheme of society 
rests. The question is, therefore, how far this re- 
striction should go. The answer of autocracy is 
that the average individual must surrender practi- 
cally all initiative in order that a wiser individual 
may rule him with unrestricted authority, pre- 
sumably for the general good. The answer of 
democracy is that the average individual must 
yield, to a government of laws rather than of men, 
just that amount of freedom of action which the 
common good demands. 

The answer of democracy is the answer of America. 
The rule is a variable one. It is a problem which 
will never be permanently solved, because it con- 
tinuously involves, under widely varying conditions, 
the application of human judgment and discretion. 



THE NEW FRONTIER 285 

But its challenge is typically American, typically 
liberal in the method which must be applied to its 
solution. To quote again the words of Professor 
Turner: 

"Legislation is taking the place of the free lance 
as the means of preserving the ideal of democracy, 
but at the same time it is endangering the other 
pioneer idea of creative and competitive individual- 
ism. Both were essential, and constituted what was 
best in America's contribution to history and to 
progress. Both must be preserved if the nation 
would be true to its best and would fulfil its highest 
destiny." 

The position of the liberal in meeting the prob- 
lem of adjusting the rights of the individual and the 
rights of the nation as a whole is paramount. He 
alone can maintain a balance which will insure 
progress. 

Perhaps the next challenge to liberal patience and 
ingenuity on the modern frontier is to construct 
a working policy, not as between the individual and 
the nation, but between this nation and the world. 
The hberal will doubtless begin with the premise 
that his own nation must first be strong, just as 
he assumes that the individual unit within the nation 
must be strong. He will insist on the patriotic 
education of the rising generation, and the Ameri- 
canization of the foreign-born elements in our 
society. In the process of educating our youth and 
our new Americans from over-seas one lesson will 



286 THE NEW FRONTIER ^ 

include Edward Everett Hale's "The Man without 
a Country." Perhaps no story ever written brings 
out more strongly that element in patriotism which 
stirs the human heart. The internationalists have 
no substitute to offer for love of country. Their 
conception is largely intellectual in its appeal; or, 
if it may be said that there is alsonn the conception 
of the political brotherhood of man, a sentiment of 
human sympathy, it must still appear to be such a 
broad and impersonal sentiment, so lacking in 
specific and conceivable qualities, so foreign to all 
the warmth and concreteness of the love of one's 
own country, that it must always lack the power to 
stir the mass of men and women to sacrifice, to 
loyalty, to common action in a common cause. 

As nations expand and populations multiply it 
is increasingly difficult to preserve the nationalistic 
ideal. As America has spread over the greater 
part of a continent it has required skill and vision 
to preserve its integrity. The centrifugal tendency 
is constantly re-asserting itself among groups of 
men, and it must be constantly offset by an em- 
phasis upon the sound and eternal impulses toward 
human coordination and unity. The thirteen colo- 
nies did not come together naturally and inevitably. 
They were bound together by the genius of a few 
far-sighted men. Later the addition of Louisiana 
to the growing nation was vigorously opposed; 
and without the clear conception, on the part of a 
few, of our "manifest destiny" California would 



THE NEW FRONTIER 287 

not today be under the American flag. " But for 
the genius of Lincoln the nation might have re- 
mained divided forever. 

Our problem today is no less difficult. The 
peoples of the world have been brought closer to- 
gether by the steady improvement in the means of 
communication. The interchange of ideas is con- 
stant and rapid. This condition renders easy the 
contacts of groups and classes the world over, and 
forms a basis, for example, for dreams of interna- 
tional labor alliances cutting across the lines of 
nationality. This tendency cannot be counter- 
acted by a passive faith in patriotism. It calls for 
a constant well-directed effort towards national 
union, a tireless organization, through the forces of 
communication within the nation itself, of the power- 
ful human elements of loyalty not only to the flag, 
but to the spirit behind the flag, to our traditions of 
human greatness and worth. Under the stimulus 
of liberty there can be produced a far sounder and 
more lasting unity, in a nation of one hundred and 
ten million or even of two hundred and ten million 
people, covering a vast territory extending from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, than was ever possible in 
the narrow confines of ancient Greece. But if 
these forces of cohesion are neglected, there are the 
elements in America of disunion, elements which if 
allowed to operate without restriction might well 
produce in a century the same kaleidoscopic group- 
ing and re-grouping of peoples we now associate 



288 THE NEW FRONTIER 

with the early history of South America, or of the 
Balkan states. This is a living and fundamental 
American problem. This, too, is a problem which 
will never be permanently solved, because with 
union always comes the challenge of disunion. 

The principle of democracy is being determined 
today. It will be re-determined in every age. 
Today we are facing the paramount issue of adapting 
our institutions founded on democracy to the grow- 
ing self-consciousness of millions of men and women. 
And upon the solution of our American problem 
will depend the part we can play in the peace and 
progress of mankind as a whole. If we are strong, 
we can help our neighbors. If we are weak our 
help is valueless. 

The application of the American liberal spirit 
to the constantly recurring questions of industry 
and politics has been suggested in previous chapters. 
It is hoped that those with time and capacity for 
such work will find it possible to expand this theme, 
necessarily touched on here in its broadest and most 
general aspects. A concrete example, however, of 
a public figure who was in many vivid ways the in- 
carnation of the pioneer spirit, will complete the 
present study. 

Theodore Roosevelt embodied many of the quali- 
ties which have been discussed in these pages. Per- 
haps the most obvious of all was his energy, his 
tireless activity, which has been characterized in a 
memorable way in "The Education of Henry 
Adams": 



THE NEW FRONTIER 289 

"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is 
the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends 
knew that his restless and combative energy was 
more than abnormal. Roosevelt more than any 
other man Hving within the range of notoriety 
showed the singular primitive quality that be- 
longs to ultimate matter — the quality that med- 
iaeval theology assigned to God — he was pure 
act." 

And yet the energy of Roosevelt was not the 
*'pure act" of the ancients. It was a distinctly 
human and personal energy which won the sym- 
pathy of men and women everywhere. His eternal 
youthfulness and enthusiasm touched a responsive 
chord in all Americans, for the qualities which he 
developed to the utmost were qualities particularly 
characteristic of the American spirit. Roosevelt 
was not loved because he was distinguished along 
lines strange and awesome and unfamiliar. He 
simply did the things every American wanted to do, 
except that he did more of them, and accomplished 
them with greater vigor and success. In a nation 
of men of action he was the most active. He liked 
strong and distinguished men around him. In 
almost all of his varied activities he numbered among 
his friends men more distinguished than himself. 
But no American ever lived who, in addition to 
achieving preeminence in one great field of activity, 
public service, attained substantial distinction in 
so many other fields of effort. 



290 THE NEW FRONTIER 

Theodore Roosevelt was a living interpretation of 
the history of his country. If we admit the in- 
fluence of the frontier upon American history, if 
we admit the character-building power growing out 
of the conquest of a continent, and a century of 
struggle with the wilderness, the question then 
arises, What are we to do today who live in crowded 
cities? What are we to do today who grow up 
and die without ever setting foot on a forest path? 
What are we to do today when one set of problems 
confronts the people of the Atlantic Coast, the 
people in the conquered wilderness of the Missis- 
sippi Valley and the people of the Far West ? Does 
not the life of Roosevelt give us the answer? Our 
last material frontier having been conquered, we nozvjace 
the great problems of social, political and industrial 
organization and of artistic creation. A frontier still con- 
fronts us, and only in the frontier spirit caji we meet it. 

Theodore Roosevelt was born in the East, of an 
old merchant family. He was a frail boy. There 
seemed to be in his make-up the raw material for 
a more or less ordinary professional or business 
career. What led him toward the West? What 
nationalized him? What touched in him the spark 
of undying American fire and gave him the strength 
to become one of the greatest Americans of history? 

Probably the complete answer to this question 
will never be known. But the fact remains that 
Roosevelt appreciated, as fully as ever man ap- 
preciated, the significance to the American people 



THE NEW FRONTIER 291 

of the winning of the West. And yet he was not a 
Westerner. In putting into practice in his crowded 
life the best elements of the American spirit, he 
taught the broad lesson that an appreciation of the 
frontier does not detract from a fair estimate of the 
contributions of Puritan New England, or of Cava- 
lier and Puritan Virginia to the splendid fabric of 
twentieth century Americanism. Roosevelt never 
ceased to be loyal to the East, especially to the city 
and state in which he was born. But first of all he 
was an American, a continental American, who 
realized that the early founders of the Republic and 
the pioneer leaders on the succession of frontiers 
moving steadily westward to the Pacific both 
played a significant part in establishing the United 
States. 

As an American, Roosevelt mistrusted no man be- 
cause he differed with his personal beliefs or his 
ancestry. No man had a greater pride in his Ameri- 
can parentage, and yet he warmly admired men of 
foreign birth. In the early days of his career, 
when he was President of the Police Board of New 
York, he said, "There must be a feeling of broad, 
radical and intense Americanism if good work is to 
be done in any direction. Our citizens must act 
as Americans; not as Americans with a prefix and 
qualifications; not as Irish-Americans, German- 
Americans, native-Americans, but as Americans 
pure and simple. It is an outrage for a man to 
drag foreign politics into our own pohtics and vote 



292 THE NEW FRONTIER 

as an Irishman or a German or other foreigner. 
It is no less an«outrage to discriminate against one 
who has become an American in good faith, because 
of his creed or birthplace." 

Wherever a man came from, whatever his posi- 
tion in hfe, the only questions Roosevelt asked 
were, "Is he straight?" "Is he strong?" 

Charles Francis Adams delivered an address in 
Virginia twelve years ago at the centennial of Robert 
E. Lee. He began his remarks with the following 
words: "Having occasion once to refer in discussion 
to certain of the founders of our Massachusetts 
Commonwealth, I made the assertion that their force 
lay in character; and I added that in saying this I 
paid and meant to pay the highest tribute which in 
my judgment could be paid to a community or to 
its typical men. Quite a number of years have 
passed since I so expressed myself, and the older I 
have grown and the more I have studied and seen, 
the greater in my esteem as an element of strength 
in a people has character become, and the less in 
the conduct of human affairs have I thought of 
mere capacity or even genius." 

In the word character lies the key to the life of 
Theodore Roosevelt and his permanent place in 
history. Sincerity, love of the square deal, courage, 
persistency — the possessor of these qualities may 
claim kinship with the tradition of the Pilgrims 
who fought against nature and the Indians on the 
first frontier of America; he is the heir of the spirit 



THE NEW FRONTIER 293 

generated in the liberty-loving groups of men and 
women who pushed that frontier in successive 
stages across the Alleghanies, through the deep 
forests of the old Northwest to the Mississippi, 
across the great plains and prairies, through the 
passes of the Rockies to Oregon and to California. 
In this victorious progress the absence of character 
did not spell failure alone. In most cases it meant 
death. 

We have referred to Roosevelt as a continental 
American. We proudly state that the men who 
wrote the Declaration of Independence and fought 
the Revolution were Americans, pioneer Ameri- 
cans, who carried to its logical conclusion the spirit 
which brought their forefathers across the Atlantic. 
Nor did the advance of the western frontiersmen 
lessen the spirit of self-reliance which characterized 
the pioneers of Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown. 
But the sons of the early pioneers of the Atlantic 
seaboard looked eastward across the Atlantic for 
much of the substance of their lives. While Benja- 
min Franklin was a pioneer in spirit, it may be said 
of him without disparagement that fundamentally he 
was a colonial Englishman rather than a typical 
American. It was only when the sturdy Virginians 
and Pennsylvanians, mingling with the Scotch- 
Irish and other vigorous stocks, pushed through 
the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio, and were 
thrown upon their own resources, that the European 
tradition was laid aside and a definite American 



294 THE NEW FRONTIER 

self-confidence developed. These pioneers turned 
their backs on Europe and their eyes toward the 
setting sun. They were the first characteristic 
native Americans, drawing their inspiration from 
their own environment and creating their own 
traditions. 

Out of that hfe grew Abraham Lincoln. He 
guided America through an overshadowing crisis, 
not by diplomatic finesse, but by rugged simplicity 
and fair dealing, by knowledge of men and women, 
by courage and human sympathy and persistency. 
We look upon him as the product of the West, but 
we may well regard him as the first great world 
figure who grew out of that dominating frontier 
influence which has distinguished us from all other 
peoples in the world. 

That same tradition inspired Theodore Roosevelt. 
His best piece of historical writing was a study of 
the expansion of America to the westward. He 
stood for that same individual courage, for common 
sense and a desire to get results in dealing with public 
questions, for that sheer joy of life, in work and in 
play, which is characteristic of the type he loved. 
He learned and lived the fundamentals of American 
character, frontier-grown. He took these funda- 
mentals and built upon them a national and an 
international policy. One hesitates to attempt to 
interpret the viewpoint of a man who touched 
upon so many modern problems, and who is being 
quoted by the advocates of both sides of almost 



THE NEW FRONTIER 295 

every current controversy. One has only to try 
it to find out how difficult it is. But it may be of 
value simply to recall the attitude of Roosevelt on 
a few significant points in order to emphasize his 
liberalism. 

Some say that his views are far too general to 
meet the needs of our day. For example, it is true 
that his doctrine of the "square deal" is not an 
industrial panacea. Other things are necessary, 
such as careful and persistent analysis of the in- 
tricate problems by engineers and men of lifelong 
industrial experience. But these things have been 
done, and well done, for decades. Alone they will 
not establish industrial peace. They help to es- 
tablish a body of sound working data, but only the 
spirit of the "square deal" can shape the facts 
into a firm and lasting basis for industrial peace. 

Will anyone argue that if the "square deal" is 
actually applied by all parties to the present con- 
troversy a solution will not be reached? To the 
question, What is the square deal? it may be 
answered that it is the solution applied by trained 
and fair-minded men in each individual case, after 
all parties to a dispute have come together with an 
honest desire to bring about a fair settlement, and 
laid the facts on the table without reserve. Roose- 
velt rated men as more important than multiplica- 
tion tables. Fie trusted to their good sense and 
fairness. And in the great majority of cases his 
confidence was justified. Suspicion breeds sus- 



296 THE NEW FRONTIER 

picion. Trust and fair dealing on one side of the 
table goes a great way toward bringing about a 
similar attitude on the other. He realized that an 
industrial problem could not be solved unless the 
men who were working for a solution knew their 
facts absolutely; but he also knew that no group, 
no matter how fully they knew the facts, would ever 
reach an agreement if they convened v^ith convic- 
tion that there was no common ground for com- 
promise and cooperation. 

The question is, are we as a people capable of 
evolving a living and working basis for the tremen- 
dous population which calls itself American? Are 
American institutions elastic enough to adapt them- 
selves to the demands which the necessities of pro- 
duction make upon them ? Have our fathers handed 
down to us a form of government and human society 
which Is best calculated to produce the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number of our people now 
and in the future? Are our present difficulties 
due to temporary maladjustments and inadequate 
coordinations, or are they due to fundamental im- 
perfections in the system itself? The radicals be- 
lieve the system is wrong and should be discarded. 
Roosevelt believed It was right and should be 
maintained. If the members of a board of arbi- 
tration meet to discuss a wage scale under the 
American system of government and some of the 
conferees are not dissatisfied with the wage scale, but 
with American institutions as a whole, it is idle to 



THE NEW FRONTIER 297 

look for an agreement. There cannot possibly be 
a meeting of minds. 

Running through the whole philosophy of hfe 
of Theodore Roosevelt, a philosophy which he 
actually lived as fully as any man of our time, is 
the emphasis upon the fundamental character of 
the average man and woman, the fundamental need 
of achieving greatness through the performance of 
an infinite number of small tasks well, of being 
ready to do the great tasks when fortune throws 
them in our way. Out of a life of public service 
extending over forty years he emerged with the 
unshaken conviction that there were in the rock 
and fiber of American character the qualities which 
would enable the nation to endure. 

He believed in work. He believed in working 
harder than any other man was willing to work. 
He never could be convinced of the advantage to 
the community of persons who produce nothing. 
All his friends were producers. They may have 
been in overalls, or they may have been in broad- 
cloth. Some of his close friends were members of 
labor unions; others were cowboys; others were 
poets; others were heads of great industries. He 
made no distinction between a poor man and a rich 
man except as their character might differ. But on 
the basis of character and on the basis of work 
done, he distinguished very rigidly and with an 
almost uncanny insight. He said, "Not once in a 
thousand times is it possible to achieve anything 



298 THE NEW FRONTIER - 

except by labor, by effort, by serious purpose and 
by the willingness to run risk," 

Above all he believed that steady day-to-day 
work and not revolutionary reform is the essence 
of progress. "In the last analysis the welfare of a 
nation depends upon its having shown a healthy 
development. A healthy social system must of 
necessity represent the sum of very many moral, 
intellectual and economic forces, and each such 
force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole 
system. . . . Society is of course infinitely more 
complex than the human body. The influences that 
tell upon it are countless; they are closely inter- 
woven, inter-dependent, and each is acted upon by 
many others. It is pathetically absurd, when such 
are the conditions, to believe that some one simple 
panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with 
infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, 
with stumblings and baitings, we are working our 
way upward and onward." 

No one was more uncompromising than Theodore 
Roosevelt when it came to questions of fundamental 
right or patriotism, and yet no one was more definite 
than he with regard to the necessity of making haste 
slowly, of sticking to the middle of the trail, of trust- 
ing men and women because of their broad funda- 
mental honesty and not expecting every leader to 
be a prophet or every measure to be perfect. He 
believed in compromise. He believed a public of- 
ficial was looked to by the people to get results; 



THE NEW FRONTIER 299 

consequently, he believed that there was a time to 
act and a time to refrain from action. But let 
no man suggest that Roosevelt ever compromised 
upon his principles of right. If compromise in- 
volved the question as to whether the right action 
should be taken today or postponed until tomorrow, 
whether the entire purpose to be gained should be 
pressed for at once, or part secured now and the re- 
mainder later, then he was ready to compromise. 
But if the suggested compromise involved a de- 
parture by one iota from what he believed to be 
fair and honest, the answer came with a suddenness 
and finality quicker than thought itself. He never 
had to debate such questions with his soul. In a 
letter written in 1916 Dr. Lyman Abbott said: 

"For five years Mr. Roosevelt and I were in- 
timately associated. We met each week in editorial 
conference to consider what course The Outlook 
should pursue in dealing with pubhc questions. He 
never asked how a given course of conduct would 
affect either the fortunes of The Outlook or his own 
political prospects; always he addressed himself to 
two questions, what is right? and what can wisely 
and effectively be done to promote the right?" 

The liberals of today are coming more and more 
to recognize the lesson in the character of Roosevelt. 
All his life his active mind was at work bringing 
his actions In line with the principles he had drawn 
from his remarkably varied experience and study. 
He read thousands of books, and better still, he 



300 THE NEW FRONTIER 

read thousands of people. And yet he was not a 
comphcated figure. When we look back on his 
life and try to draw out the lesson of his work and 
the lesson of his words, we see in them both the few 
simple strains of vigor and liberalism and fair play. 
In a recent penetrating editorial, the New York 
Globe had this to say of him: 

"More sweeping changes are now conceded, even 
by conservatives, than any which he ever seriously 
considered. But his influence is helping us to pass 
through the necessary transition in comparative 
peace. Between the blind forces on one side and 
the other of the industrial conflict stands a more or 
less enlightened middle group, which is trying to 
discern not a balance of -power hut an equilibrium of 
justice. This is Roosevelt's group. He trained it. 
He more than any other modern figure helped to 
form the ideals of what we loosely call *the public'." 

"Not a balance of power but an equilibrium of 
justice" — this is the torch the liberals of America 
must take up and bear forward. "This Is Roose- 
velt's group. He trained It." It Is a group which 
grows larger each day. It Is not partisan but na- 
tional. It cannot be captured by any clique or party. 
There is no man In America today capable of mon- 
opolizing the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. His 
achievement Is the property of the whole people. 
He has lived to set up standards which his friends 
will continue to hold aloft. And who are not his 
friends ? Now that he has gone we realize how well 



THE NEW FRONTIER 301 

his country could have used him in these trying 
days; and we rejoice that his spirit is marching on. 

The spirit of this notable modern frontiersman 
lives in the stirring words of Herman Hagedorn: 

"And now the great hunter has gone West. He 
was found faithful in a few things and he was made 
ruler over many; he cut his own trail clean and 
straight and millions followed him toward the light. 
He was frail; he made himself a tower of strength. 
He was timid; he made himself a lion of courage. 
He_was a dreamer; he became one of the great 
doers of all time. Men put their trust in him; 
women found a champion in him; kings stood in 
awe of him, but children made him their playmate. 
He broke a nation's slumber with his cry, and it 
rose up. He touched the eyes of blind men with 
a flame that gave them vision. Souls became swords 
through him; swords became servants of God. 
He was loyal to his country and he exacted loyalty; 
he loved many lands, but he loved his own land best. 
He was terrible in battle, but tender to the weak; 
joyous and tireless, being free from self-pity; clean 
with a cleanness that cleansed the air like a gale. 
His courtesy knew no wealth, no class, his friend- 
ship, no creed or color or race. His courage stood 
every onslaught of savage beast and ruthless man, 
of loneliness, of victory, of defeat. His mind was 
eager, his heart was true, his body and spirit, de- 
fiant of obstacles, ready to meet what might come. 
He fought injustice and tyranny; bore sorrow 



302 THE NEW FRONTIER 

gallantly; loved all nature, bleak spaces and hardy- 
companions, hazardous adventure and the zest of 
battle. Wherever he went he carried his own 
pack; and in the uttermost parts of the earth he 
kept his conscience for his guide." 
i He won through to a new frontier of American 
character. The trail he blazed was a trail of liberal 
leadership. It is a challenge to all whose blood 
has been touched by the fire of the American spirit, 
to all who believe that Americanism means that 
men and women are born to put more into their country 
than they take out of it. 



APPENDIX 



y 



APPENDIX 

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the bibli- 
ography of American history the following list is appended, 
with the distinct understanding that it is the list of a 
layman and not of a scientific student of history. The 
list is based largely on books in the author's own library 
or lists which have been suggested by those whose judg- 
ment on such matters is most likely to appeal to the 
average reader. These books have been chosen primarily 
because they were sound and accurate, and with an eye 
to their being readable. 

Further lists may be found by referring to the bibli- 
ographies at the end of many of the volumes and in some 
cases at the end of chapters in some of the volumes; and 
reference is made below to one excellent bibliographical 
list: 

I. Excellent Single Volumes: 

The Development of the United States. Max Farrand (Houghton, 

Mifflin). 
This brief, quick survey of the whole period of the history of the 
United States has a fresh point of view and is extremely well written. 
It may be regarded as the minimum that any intelligent American 
should know of the history of his country. 

The Frontier in American History. Frederick J. Turner (Henry 

Holt). 
This material has been frequently referred to in the text. 
The Critical Period of American History. John Fiske (Houghton, 

Mifflin). 
Perhaps the best single piece of writing which Fiske did. It gives 
a splendid picture of the stirring years which preceded the adoption of 
the American Constitution, 

PS 



3o6 APPENDIX 

A Short History of the Mississippi Valley. James K. Hosmer (Hough- 
ton, MifBin). 

This small book contains a vivid presentation of the essential facts 
of the opening up of the great Empire between the Alleghanies and 
the Mississippi Valley. 

History of the Civil War. James Ford Rhodes (Macmillan). 

The first adequate single volume treating of the American Civil War. 
It is an interesting fact, in view of the multitude of histories now ap- 
pearing on the war in Europe, that with all the material close at hand 
a really adequate, brief summary of the American Civil War did not 
appear until more than fifty years after the war was over. 

2. The Background: 

The Expansion of Europe. W. C. Abbott (Henry Holt). 
Referred to on pages 38, 40, 43. 

3. Standard Sets: 

France and England in North America. Francis Parkman (Twelve 
Volumes) — (Little, Brown). 

This set includes: The Jesuits in North America; La Salle and the 
Discovery of the Great West; A Half Century of Conflict; Pioneers of France 
in the New World; The Conspiracy of Pontiac; Montcalm and Wolfe. 

Works on the Early History of America. John Fiske (Houghton, 
Mifflin). 

The series includes: The Discovery of America, in two volumes; Old 
Virginia and Her Neighbors, in two volumes; The Beginnings of New 
England, in one volume; New France and New England, in one volume; 
The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, in two volumes; The American 
Revolution, in two volumes; and the single volume mentioned above. 

History of the United States. Henry Adams (Scribner). 

This brilliant study in nine small volumes covers in a suggestive 
manner the history of the United States from 1801 to 1817, the ad- 
ministrations of Jefferson and Madison, and gives a subtle analysis of 
the character and early development of the American people. 

The Winning of the West. Theodore Roosevelt (Various editions). 

This is probably Roosevelt's best piece of historical writing. 

History of the United States. James Ford Rhodes (Seven Volumes — 
1850-1897) — (Macmillan). 

A highly readable story with a rich American flavor, based to a 
considerable extent on contemporary newspaper accounts. It brings 
out vividly the personalities of the great figures involved in the Civil 



APPENDIX 307 

War and the years which preceded it. It does not take into considera- 
tion the elements of national progress particularly associated with the 
significant westward movement. 

History of the United States. Edward Channing (Four Volumes) — 
(Macmillan). 

A readable and suggestive history of the United States from the 
earliest times up to 1815, which concludes Volume Four. It is under- 
stood that Volume Five, which will treat of the Westward movement 
is nearly completed. These volumes have a strong appeal to the average 
reader because of the straightforwardness with which the facts are 
presented. While not without vision and suggestiveness, the writer 
distinctly has his feet on the ground. 

The American Revolution. Sir George Otto Trevelyan (Six Volumes) 

■ — (Longmans, Green). 
A fair and brilliant piece of historical writing by a sympathetic 
Englishman. 

The American Nation. Edited by A. B. Hart (Twenty-seven Volumes) 

— (Harper). 

A cooperative work which covers American history from the earliest 
times down to the present day. Each volume is written by an expert. 
From the point of view of the general reader these volumes are somewhat 
unequal in interest, but some of them cover phases of our history which 
cannot be found briefly and adequately treated elsewhere. The general 
reader will easily find by glancing over the individual titles which books 
appeal to his interest. 

The Chronicles of America. Edited by Allen Johnson (Fifty Volumes) 

— (Yale University Press). 

The publication of The Chronicles of America marks an epoch in 
American historical writing. Not only are these books remarkable 
examples of book making, attractive in size and easy to read, but they 
are the first attempt to present the history of America to the general 
reader in the form of stories with real literary flavor, which at the same 
time adhere closely to the actual facts of history. Like the volumes in 
the American Nation series, the volumes which have so far appeared 
in the Chronicles of America are somewhat uneven; but they are all 
readable and some of them as, for example. The Old Merchant Marine, 
by Ralph D. Payne; The Passing of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough; 
The Eve of the Revolution, by Carl Becker, to select only a few titles, 
are positively brilliant. 



3o8 APPENDIX 

The Riverside History of the United States. (Four Volumes) — 
(Houghton, Mifflin). 

This compact history in four small, well written volumes by four 
authorities is perhaps the most available briefer history of the United 
States. 

4. Biography: 

The American Statesmen. (Houghton, Mifflin.) 
These small volumes are generally adequate treatments of the 
principal figures. 

Among the other brilliant American biographies may be mentioned 
Abraham Lincoln, by Lord Charnwood (Henry Holt); Daniel Boone, 
by Reuben Goldthwaites (Appleton); Alexander Hamilton, hy Frederick 
Oliver (Putnam); Stonewall Jackson, G. F. R. Henderson (Longmans, 
Green); Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, (Century Co.); The Life of 
John Hay, William Roscoe Thayer (Houghton, Mifflin). 

5. Special topics: 

American History and its Geographic Conditions, E. C. Semple 
(Houghton, Mifflin); Principles of American Diplomacy, John 
Bassett Moore (Harper); The American Commonwealth, James Bryce 
(Macmillan); History of Labor in the United States, John R. Commons, 
Editor, (Macmillan); Economic History of the United States, E. L. 
Bogart (Longmans, Green); Financial History of the United States, 
D. R. Dewey (Longmans, Green); Industrial History of the United 
States, Katharine Coman (Macmillan). 

6. Bibliography: 

Guide to the Study and Reading of American History, Channing, Hart 
& Turner (Ginn). 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Dr. Lyman, 299 

Abbott, Professor W, C, "Expan- 
sion of Europe," quoted, 38-39, 
39-40, 41-42; cited, 44 

Adams, Charles Francis, quoted, 
292 

Adams, John Quincy, 50 

Adams, Henry, quoted, 10, li; 
his "History of the United 
States," characterized as best 
American historical writing, 53; 
"The Education of Henry 
Adams," quoted, 288-292 

Advertising, its magnitude and 
importance, 220-223 

Allen, Ethan, 48 

American Alliance for Labor and 
Democracy, quoted, 116-118 

Americanism, analysis of, 3-10; 
eternal youthfulness a charac- 
teristic of, 6, 26; essence of, 
269-270 

Barton, Bruce, "The New Yorker's 
Creed," quoted, 188-189 

Becker, Professor Carl, "Begin- 
ning of the American People,'* 
quoted, 44-45 

Belleau Wood, battle of, 42 

Bolshevism, 70; how to combat 
it, 197-198 

Boone, Daniel, 13, 14, 16 

Buchanan, James, 50 

Burton, Pomeroy, Manager of the 
London Mail, quoted, 213-214 



Cabot, John, 47-48 

Calvin, John, 8g 

Capitalism, the United States ' 
committed to, I44-147 

Channing, Edward, "History of 
the United States," 239 

Charnwood, Lord, "Life of Lin- 
coln," quoted, 30-31; cited, 
263; his analysis of the Ameri- 
can spirit in the "Anglo- 
French Review," quoted, 263- 
269 

Churchill, Winston, quoted, 146 

Clark, William, 16 

Clay, Henry, "Economics for the 
General Public,'!, quoted, 156- 

157 . ,. ^ 

Cleveland, Grover,'*loO 

Columbus, 44, 47 

Congress, composition of, 89-90; 
prevailing criticism of, 91; a 
representative group, 91-92 

Constitutional Convention, the, 

133 

Continental Congress, the, 19 
Conventions, their efficiency, 133- 

134 
Coolidge,- Governor, of Massa-^ 

chusetts, 61 
Cortez, 38 
Crockett, David, 14, 16 

Danton, 87 

Declaration of Independence, 
quoted, 73 



3" 



312 



INDEX 



Democracy, existed before 1776, 
3-4; American democracy, 30 
De Soto, 48 
Donhara, Dean, 159 
Drake, Sir Francis, 45 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 
35-36, 205, 282 

Farrand, Professor Max, "The 
'Development of the United 
States," quoted, 25-26 

Ferrero, "Greatness and Decline 
of Rome," quoted, 223-224 

Fess, Dr. Simeon D., quoted, 99 

Frank, Glenn, "The Politics of 
Industry," quoted, 134-136 

Franklin, Benjamin, 293 

Free speech, curbing of during the 
war, 71-72; a foundation stone 
of American liberty, 72; the 
liberal's attitude toward, 74 

Hagedorn, Herman, tribute to 
Roosevelt, quoted, 301-302 

Hakluyt, Richard, English geog- 
rapher, 46 

Hale, Edward Everett, "The Man 
without a Country," 286 

Hamilton, Alexander, 26, 92, 169, 
170, 

Harvard Liberal Club, the, 57 

Hawkins, Sir John, 45 

Hayes, Rutherford B., 50 

Hays, Will H., 123-124 

Henderson, Colonel, "Stonewall 
Jackson," 263 

Hillquit, Morris, "History of 
Socialism in the United States," 
quoted, 80-81; 82 

History, average American not 
conversant with American his- 



tory, 37; American history less 
brilliant than European, 38; 
Professor Abbott's emphasis 
upon progress of human char- 
acter in history, 38-42; Ameri- 
can historical writing divorced 
from literary merit, 51-52 

Holmes, Justice, of United States 
Supreme Court, quoted, 72 

Holmes Professor Henry W., 
quoted, 197 

Hoover, Herbert, his direction of 
the Second Industrial Confer- 
ence at Washington, 114; 
quoted, 123 

Hosmer, James K., 86 

Hough, Emerson, quoted, 33, 98 

Houston, Samuel, 16 

Industrial Democracy, nature of, 

I 19-124 
Irving, Washington, 38 

Jackson, Andrew, 9, 13, 16, 50; 
Fifth Annual Message to Con- 
gress, quoted, 149-150; Seventh 
An7iual Message to Congress, 
quoted, 150 

James, William, "The Energies 
of Men," quoted, 190-191, 194, 
282-283 

Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 26, 36, 83, 
IS4 

Kellog, Paul V., and Gleason, 
Arthur, "British Labor and 
the War," quoted, I2I-I22 

Kieft, William, Governor of New 
Amsterdam, 169 

Labor unions, not the real enemy 
of business, mj distinction 



INDEX 



313 



between good and bad unions, 
112 

La Salle, 48 

Liberalism, defined, 56-57; Ameri- 
ca's need of liberals, 57-60; 
the liberal, a man who takes a 
middle course, 62-63, 67; lib- 
erals not a class, 63 

Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 26, 28; 
his life embodiment of rugged 
Americanism, 30; cited, 36, 50; 
quoted, 'j'j; cited, 87, 106, 133, 
193, 207; quoted, 270-271; 
cited, 287, 294 

Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 55, 

25s 

Lowell, President of Harvard Uni- 
versity, quoted, 208-21 1 

Luther, Martin, 89 

Marco Polo, 44 

Marx, Karl, 63 

McClellan, George B., 106 

McKinley, William, 55 

Mitchell, President of Delaware 

College, quoted, S'}, 
Monroe, James, 9 
Morgenstierne, Wilhelm, quoted, 

276-277 
Motley, John, "The Rise of the 

Dutch Republic," 38, 263 

New York Globe, quoted, 243-244 
Noyes, Alfred, quoted, 45-46 

Oliver, Frederick, "Alexander 
Hamilton," 263 

Parkman, Francis, his series of 
histories of America, 49; a 
man of letters as well as a 
historian, 52-53 



Perkins, George W., "Economics 
New versus Economics Old," 
in The Economic Worlds quoted, 
236-237 

Pizarro, 38 

Preamble of the Constitution of 
the United States, quoted, 97 

Prescott, WilHam H., 37-38 

Prince Henry the Navigator, 44 

Quaife, Dr. M. N., his discussion 
on historical writing in the 
Mississippi Valley Historical 
Review, quoted, 52-53 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 45 

Reactionary, defined as believer 
in the status quo, 65 

"Reds," synonymous with anar- 
chists, 64; cited, 70; average 
laboring man's scorn for, 71; 
cited, 198 

Reformation, the, 88 

Rhodes, James Ford, his opinion 
of Henry Adams* "History of 
the United States," 53; his 
history, 54 

Robertson, James, 16 

Robespierre, 87 

Roosevelt, Theodore, his love of 
open spaces, 13; life embodi- 
ment of American spirit, 15; 
"The Winning of the West," 
quoted, 15-16, 17-18, 19-20, 
20-22; cited, 26, 28; knowledge 
of frontier spirit, 33; cited, 36; 
address before American His- 
torical Association on "History 
as Literature," quoted, 51-52; 
quoted, 86; cited, 87, 93, 94, 
112, 139; quoted, 161-162; 



314 



INDEX 



cited, 234, 245; his philosophy 
of life, 292-300 
Ruskin, John, 106 

Scheele, Swedish pharmacist, 39 

Sevier, a Shenandoah Huguenot, 
16 

Socialism, cited, 80, 81; will pre- 
vail if right, 83 

Socialists, defined as law-abiding 
radicals, 64-65 

Strikes, 11 8-1 19 

Stuyvesant, Peter, 169 

Sullivan, Tim, 92 

Syndicalists, defined as violent 
radicals, 64 

Taft, William Howard, 50, 166 
The Economic World, newspaper, 

236 
Thoreau, Henry, 13 
Turner, Professor Frederick J., 

quoted, 4-5, 7> n. 272-^7S> 285 



Vanderlip, Mr., 201 
Vespucci, Amerigo, 48 

Wall Street, its history, 169-172; 
its function, 172-175; prevail- 
ing attitude toward, 184-186 

Washington, George, 13, 26, 36, 
SO> 170 

Watauga Association, the, 20, 

25 
Watterson, Galonel Henry, quoted, 

107-108 
Wells, H. G., 85 

Whitley Report, quoted, 122-123 
Wilson, Woodrow, "Division and 

Reunion," quoted, 23-24; 

"Congressional Government," 

quoted, 99-100; quoted, 160- 

161 
Women, their attainment of the 

ballot, 95-98 
Woods, Arthur, "The Policeman 

and the Public," quoted, 74-76 



